Saturday, May 20, 2006

|Revelation.|

I was in the shower this morning thinking about how I again wanted to stop going online to gay dating/sex/chat sites, but also thinking, "But how can I? I mean, eventually I'm going to find someone who finds me attractive and/or wants to be my friend." Of course, then I thought, "That's probably not true."

I am constantly going back and forth (or not really back and forth so much as I have these battling, conflicting thoughts in myhead all the time). And then I started a new thought. "I am a logical, rational person. I'm sure there is a way I can reason myself out of using gay websites."

I started from, "Does it achieve it's goals?" Eight years of almost complete and total failure says no. And through successive baby steps I actually came to a way in which I can 1) fight the urge to go to gay sites for social interaction and 2) have faith that gay men aren't all horrible people and 3) actually try and make friends/date them, but only in the physical realm.

I think the fact that I began this calculus in the shower in the morning (my two favorite things in this life are showers and mornings) really helped. I think that maybe the negative outlook I tend to have right before I go to bed about how no one finds me interesting or attractive or could ever want anything to do with me and how I'll never have someone to lie in the grass with would have set up strong roadblocks to my achieving this clarity. Just maybe.

So, here we go. Once again, from here on out, it's a whole new Jan Brady.


promulgated by SWS2.1 at 12:07.
0 comments

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Monday, May 15, 2006

|The Saga Ends, Part II.|

So, here's the run down:

Total Applications: 20

Where I got in (USNWR order): NYU, UPenn, UMichigan, Northwestern, Georgetown, USC, Vanderbilt, BU, BC, Fordham, UW-Madison, Cardozo and Brooklyn

Where I got out: Yale and Chicago

Where I was waitlisted: Stanford, Harvard and Berkeley

Where I was waitlisted but they refer to it as a pre-waitlist "reserve" which is essentially the same goddamned thing: Columbia and Cornell

Where I saw myself getting into when this all started: UW-Madison (as a stretch), Cardozo and Brooklyn (if I hadn't gotten need-based fee waivers, I probably wouldn't have applied to many/any of the top schools)

Yet I'm going to NYU and, technically, I barely have to pay a dime.

Clearly I was not very sagacious about this saga. W00t.


promulgated by SWS2.1 at 18:11.
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|The Saga Ends, Part I.|

So I got rejected from Yale.

On January 31st.

I found this out just the other day. I called because I still had not heard a decision or received any letter and thought it only fair that 8 months and a graduation later, I should receive some kind of answer.

And from the Jabba-the-hut sounding unhelpful woman with whom I've spoken in the past, I got, "Uh... your letter was already mailed out... on January 31st." "Uhm... okay. So what was the response?" "Uh, no." "Uhm, okay, thanks."

And then I called back because it hit me that the woman might not think to send the letter back out to me. I got a different, far more helpful woman this time, who agreed to mail the letter to me again, but also told me Yale's "policy":

They will not check to see about an applicant's file's status until after May 1st. All the times I'd called (definitely more than once after Jan 31st) when I was told that a decision had not been made, the person who gave me that information was lying because that person, pursuant to Yale's policy, did not actually look up my information. Because, as the kind and helpful woman put it, Yale has so many applicants (point of fact, because of Yale's extremely low acceptance rate and small class, they actually get only about 4000-5000 applications, far fewer than many other law schools, like Georgetown, for instance, which gets 12000 applications) that they just don't have time to constantly check. So, rather than check, they have a policy of not actually looking up anyone's file until May 1st and just consistently saying that "no decision has been reached" because obviously if a decision had been reached then the applicant would probably know by then or shortly (if it were a rejection coming in the mail) and there would be no problem.

I, of course, pointed out the great flaw in this system is what's happening to me now. My letter, apparently, was lost in the mail. And every time I called, I was told, and the person telling me of course knew no better because she wasn't actually ever checking, that a decision had not been reached. Had I been waiting for a decision from Yale to make my ultimate decision, I would have been fully and royally screwed. Her response: "In that case, you could have just emailed us."

Uhm, yeah, because everyone else I know who has tried that has gotten a response from Yale many weeks later and has, ultimately, been rejected? Oh, and yeah, because even though Yale needs months and months to decide on applicants and is as selective as Stanford and Harvard, somehow they would, unlike Stanford and Harvard (Harvard and Stanford: "We understand you have decisions to make, but we cannot speed up the process for any one applicant and we realize this is inconvenient but sometimes that's just the way it has to be.") who don't give a damn about any individual applicant, actually be able to expedite things and get a non-rejection decision out to a potentially acceptable applicant who needs a decision sooner?

Yeah, right.


promulgated by SWS2.1 at 18:01.
0 comments

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Sunday, May 14, 2006

|Graduation.|

I graduate on Wednesday. Sort of. I will not be attending, so I guess I'm already done.

Tonight I had my Graduation dinner, and I dare say it was an amazingly perfect evening.

Perfect because the people that I have in and around me are some of the most amazing people on this planet and I know that I would not have achieved any of what I have achieved or perhaps will achieve if not for their constant help, support, care and concern.

And I love them for being different. Here's a list:

1 Actress
1 Film Maker
1 TV News Producer
2 Lawyers to be (not including myself)
1 Astrophysicist
2 Non-profiters (refugees for the one; the homeless for the other)
1 Interior Designer
1.5 Print Media Do-ers
1 Biological Researcher
1 Medical Researcher
1 Soon-to-be graduate like myself who's off to find herself in the world, starting with southern France.

I love it. I love them. And not just because they banded together, pooled their resources and bought me a standing KitchenAid mixer.



promulgated by SWS2.1 at 23:07.
2 comments

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Monday, May 01, 2006

|A Good End.|

I walked to class today listening to Sufjan Stevens', "Chicago." I, in fact, was listening to Sufjan Stevens all morning.

As I arrived to class, my last class at Columbia for (probably) ever (incidentally at Barnard), I turned off my iPod and tucked it into my yellow MTA messenger bag.

My professor handed out class evaluations, turned on some music, and stepped out of the room. And I was once again engulfed in Sufjan Stevens. This time, "Come on! Feel the Illinoise." More than a few kids knew the words, and more than a few kids, myself included, quietly sung them out loud.

This has been the oddest semester. All of my classes, though mostly very distinct, overlapped in theory if not also in theorists. My political sociology class began the term with discussions of power. I wrote about those theories in a paper for my masculinity course (the course that caps the end of my time here), and the professor then talked about those same theories today, wrapping up the course. My seminar on the stranger in society found its way to the critical gender theorists I read about in my masculinity course as well as to the notions of social interaction and social contagion lectured on in my course on networks. In political sociology we discussed ethnicity and otherness, especially in terms of colonialization, colonialization and ethnicity being a whole session in my stranger seminar. And the multiple connections that all of my classes made with one another, is umbrella'ed by my networks course, connections and links being the grit of the subject matter.

I think that when the connections start to reveal themselves -- start to become all a student can see, then his liberal arts education was good and complete.

I started today, my last day of classes, with Sufjan Stevens and I ended my final class with Sufjan Stevens. I started this semester with four courses that I thought were very distinct, and ended with a cooperative. I started Columbia positive and hopeful, sure of myself and my future. Along the way I veered and detoured, but I feel I am ending Columbia postive and hopeful, sure of myself and my future.

It's a good end.


promulgated by SWS2.1 at 11:54.
2 comments

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|If My Penis Says So.|

I was looking at myself in the mirror this morning. I had gone to the gym, as I've been doing very regularly in the early AM, and I was relaxing with a bowl of oatmeal and some Sufjan Stevens.

The oddest thing happened as I was looking at myself in the mirror.

For a long time I could not do that. I cannot recall when it started, but for years, if not decades, I could not look myself in the mirror. I would only do it if I had to, such as when shaving or when trying on clothes. But even then it was only brief instants, and in those moments when I would be face to face with my own reflection, I would lamentably enumerate in my mind all of the things that I saw: gaping pores, blemishes, slightly lazy right eyelid, my too big and too flat nose, my receding hairline, ever chapped lips, the gap in my front teeth, razor bumps all over my neck, the hair on my shoulders and upperback, the hair on my lower back, the hair all over my chest and stomach, stretch marks on my arms standing forever as tell-tell signs of my overweight past, the potness of my belly (which I would very rarely ever let out -- I am never walking around and not super sucking in my gut), the non-muscle of my arms, the flab of my love handles, the acne all over my body that I've had come and go since I was 11 in certain places that to the untrained and suspicious eye looks like a sexually transmitted infection, the largesse of my hips, my bowed legs, my swayback that makes my ass look large, my fat ass, my uselessly thin calves, my feet that have an oversweating problem resulting in extreme dryness so that I will never, ever be able to wear thongs or sandals and primarily why I absolutely dread going to the beach, my chipped toe nails, stretch marks on my hips, me.

Even as recent as being in Paris, I've not been able to look at myself in the mirror. Being there, however, and realizing that guys can and do find me attractive, I did start to look at myself in the mirror and tried to do it without running through the laundry list of imperfections (not even imperfections, but irregularities and abnormalities, in my book, at least) of my body, of myself, but it was an uphill battle every time.

People are often quick to remind me that I've had a lot of sex. And that's true, I'd say I've had well over 1000 sexual partners, probably closer to 1500 at this point. But does that mean that guys find me attractive? I've never felt so. Of course, I'm not really objective. Or, I'm as objective as any scientist who sees his own biased and subjective rationale as not actually informing his objective research. Still, so many guys/people will have sex with someone who they don't find attractive. How many threesomes have I been in where it was clear I was either only wanted by the one of the two who invited me or was a third wheel? How much of my sex has been gotten at 2 or 3 in the morning when, more likely than not, the guy on the other side of the screen had probably been looking just as long as I would have been and was ready to take nearly anything at the point at which I chanced upon him in the chat room?

I still haven't ever really dated. The longest relationship I've had was 6 weeks, and the last 2 weeks of which we really weren't actually together. And that relationship stands as 33.3 (bar) % of my relationships. Yeah, just 3. All within the span of what I would say was an odd and schizophrenic 12 months. No one has ever asked me out and most guys I've ever asked out have said no. Of course, I speak in generalities of myself and perhaps that's not fair. I was once picked up by a rather hot (though drunk and high) guy on the subway, we exchanged numbers, and then he called me and invited me over not less than an hour after parting ways on the train. And I did once hookup with a guy in a bar, a friend of Adam's. Adam and I went to The Park, the guy was there, sans his friends, and then Adam abandoned us. Perhaps because he had to get up early the next day (well, early for Adam). Perhaps because I had previously met this friend of Adam's and had expressed an interest in him. Long story short, I did go home with him that night. And a good time was had. And he expressed an interest in seeing me again. And then never once returned a phone call, so what should I make of that?

The point of this diatribe is that I don't think I had any reason to look at myself in the mirror without being upset/frustrated/disappointed/disheartened/depressed/angered by what looked back at me.

But I've started to force myself to look at myself. And I've tried to quiet my thoughts. As the saying goes, "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." More and more I've been looking at myself. And for the past 2 months I've been working out regularly, for the most part, eating healthily, for the most part, and realizing little by little how sweet (my) life is.

And then this morning, as I was eating my oatmeal, I got the notion to get undressed and go stand in front of my full-length mirror. I stared at my eyes, at my shaved head, at my lips and my chest and my stomach and my hair and my penis and my legs. I glided my hands over the cacao pasture of me, felt the valleys and knolls where muscles have ripened, never looking at myself but never taking my eyes off of my reflection, and I started to get erect.

I've said that I think I'm attractive, though I often qualify that or counter it in the next breath. While I've said it, and I try to only say what I mean, I think that, in this case, I've mostly only ever said it so that people wouldn't be brought down by what I was saying or feel pity for me, when what I was after was understanding.

But the thing about the male penis is that, when not riding on a bus or being physically stimulated in anyway, it does not rise to attention unless prompted by attraction.

I looked at myself in the mirror this morning and the person that I saw looking back at me was someone I found attractive. I was not thinking about my hair or my pores or my love handles, I was thinking about the whole of me and all that lay before me, the entire system of cells and pigments and follicles, turned me on. No, I did not become fully erect -- the moment I realized what was happening I lost my hard-on. But that does not diminish the gravity of the occurrence.

This still leaves the question, though, of confidence. If I find myself attractive, and the most definitive judge of attraction, my penis, says that I do, then why don't I have confidence? Because no matter how much I believe in myself, I have yet to grasp that others believe in me to the same (or any) extent. When you are growing up, teachers and parents and books and even traveling puppet shows espouse the importance of believing in yourself (::raps:: "I like myself, I'm worth a lot!"), but no one ever says to believe that others believe in you, but that really is what you need. You want the people who you encounter, the people around you, to think highly of you, to like and respect and enjoy you. I feel safe in saying that it's probably far easier to go from believing that others believe in you to believing in yourself than to go from believing in yourself to believing that others believe in you.

So where does this leave me?

I cannot escape the truism that people respond well to confidence. Unattractive people who think that they are attractive can come off as very attractive, though I would argue that perhaps they are helped by believing that others find them physically attractive, regardless of their own personal charsima.

In any case, maybe that's where I start. I do not know that I've ever had or achieved anything the easy way. It seems harmonious to my leitmotif that it is from believing in myself that I have to get to believing that others believe in me.

And at first glance, that seems somehow sad. Depressing, really. But it's a start. This square one was no where on the horizon weeks ago.

I guess, waxing "Field of Dreams" and no pun intended, "If your penis rises, they will come."



promulgated by SWS2.1 at 11:08.
1 comments

________________________

|Septimus Warren Smith 2.1|

I went to an Ivy League undergrad.
I go to a top NYC law school.
I date men (well...).
I live in Bed-Stuy.
I don't need more to say,
just more room to say it.
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