Why marriage equality is better for everyone

As I drove up to Provincetown this afternoon to join in the celebrations I thought a lot about why it matters. To me specifically, how is this possibly relevant? Because of course there is Katie and Brenda and Lori and Ellen and Arlie and Julie and really the list is too long of people I know and love for whom this has a direct and immediate impact. Those people all happen to live in states where their marriages (or potential marriages) were already legal, but it's not like they never went on vacation. Do you really want to have to keep track of which states you can visit so that if you get in a car accident you can assume you'll be granted medical decision making for your spouse? Of course you don't want to, so why should you force them to?

All of that is second hand though, isn't it? Why should I, as someone with no interest in marriage for myself, care how the rest of society defines marriage? Because when society only has one very narrowly defined - if widely conformed to - idea of what an appropriate relationship should be then everyone who doesn't fit that definition is being told their relationships are less valuable. So if marriage is only "one man and one woman for the purposes of procreation" then there are a whole lot of people who are less than ideal. The gays were so non-conformist that their relationships couldn't be legally recognized at all. But what about all the M/F couples who couldn't have/didn't want/got married too late for kids? They spent the last 11+ years listening to people make arguments that boiled down to "we'll let you get married, but until you pop out a few kids we think you're faking it."

And if the epitome of the socially acceptable relationship is children then where does that leave me? I'm never having kids. I have no interest in the kind of relationship that could lead to kids. That's not who I am. As a result none of my relationships could ever be deemed valid. I do not fit the narrow definition of what society says we should all be striving for. How sad for society. How sad and stilted and unimaginative for a community to think there can only be one way to love a person, one kind of person to love, one way to have sex. That's not a society I wanted to live in, and today because of the supreme court decision that is not a society I have to live in.

We are ALL better off when all of us are allowed to be who we are. Statistically speaking the vast majority of marriages are M/F+kid(s), and this is better for all of them as well. Because those people might conform in that way on this issue, but I do not believe there is nothing about them that makes them unique. Today uniqueness got a boost.

So I went to Provincetown to be part of the historic occasion. I knew it would be a happy place. 11 years ago this town hall was the first in the nation to issue same sex marriage licenses. I was 45 minutes away, I couldn't miss it.

Here, have some photos of the celebrations.

The TA's role as mentor

I often talk about the stories we tell and how disappointed I am with the stories Hollywood chooses to tell, and the lack of women and women's voices in the stories coming out of the media industry. The thing is I don't think I'm going to storm Hollywood and change the industry. But what I can do is be a mentor to the next generation of storytellers. That's part of why I want to teach, and what I enjoy about teaching. However, I don't have to wait for that elusive professor job because right now I am a TA and even when not, I'm a grad student in with a bunch of undergrads.

Representation

Of the 250 top grossing films 83.6% had a straight white male protagonist.

This is not a long read and it's an interesting look at the numbers.

Writing for television

We have a series at school that they call cinemateque that is screenings with discussions held about 6 times each semester. Everyone in the department is required to go to at least 2. I think I did 4 this term because they're really quite interesting most of the time. The last one of the semester was on Friday with a woman who writes for television. We screened episodes from 2 very different shows that she's written for and then had a great Q&A with her. One of my friends asked what she talked about and after I realized there's probably several friends who might find this interesting.

where are the women?

For Cinematography we are going to have to do a report on a cinematographer of our choice. As I'm not the kind of person to memorize crew names of films, I don't really know any apart from Haskell Wexler from last term's film studies presentation. So I've arbitrarily decided I want to pick an American woman working in fiction film. WHY ARE THEY SO HARD TO FIND?

The same but different

We had an exercise for screenwriting where we were all given the same backstory and characters and premise and then had to write a scene for it. Part of the point of the exercise was making sure we all know how to properly format things. And part of it was to prove a point: there may not be any new stories, but every old story told by a new person is unique. They're all up on the class web page now so we can read them before tomorrow and that point is very well proved. One was set in 1944 (mine), one was set in 2114, the rest were contemporary. And if you had stripped the names off I probably still could have said who had written what. We all bring ourselves to our work and so it has to be unique.

Mom was having a similar experience this week in her pottery class. They were making mountains. And that was the assignment: make a mountain with a house. And she said she was really entertained by how different everyone's mountains were.

I think that's what I like about art and creativity. It has to be unique even when it's similar just because every artist is unique. But also every viewer is unique and everyone will look at the same thing and get something different out of it. So no, there may not be any new stories, but every telling, and every hearing has its own newness.

a good quote

There seems no doubt that a group can make or break its members, and that it's more powerful than the individuals in it. A great group can propel its members forward so that they achieve amazing things. Many teachers don't seem to think that manipulating a group is their responsibility at all. If they're working with a destructive, bored group they just blame the students for being 'dull', or uninterested. It's essential for the teacher to blame himself if the group aren't in a good state.

Normal schooling is intensely competitive, and the students are supposed to try and outdo each other. If I explain to a group that they're to work for the other members, that each individual is to be interested in the progress of the other members, they're amazed, yet obviously if a group supports its own members strongly, it'll be a better group to work in.

This comes from Keith Johnstone's book Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. He's an acting teacher and that's what the book is mostly about, but earlier in his life he'd been an elementary school teacher (8 to 10 year olds). He's British and he was teaching school in the 50s and acting in the 60s and 70s. (Maybe later, but the book was copyright 1979.) What I find interesting is how much he seems to be describing the American educational system. And America generally, really. We are so competitive, so individualistic. I can and will make it on my own. I can't win unless you lose. And yet to me his point seems so obvious. If we work together we will achieve so much more than if we rely only on ourselves.

I think that's one of the things that draws me to filmmaking. It's a team sport. you can't really do it alone. And in my experience the ideas that start out just in my head end up so much better after the collaborative group gets involved.

Going to Boston

When I was a kid in my last year of high school my sister got a job downtown and my school was also downtown. It was tough to park downtown for her for work but at school we had a parking lot so we started commuting together. The way the highways are we'd get about 2/3 of the way to school and work and there was a split in the highway that said Albany one way and Boston the other. Particularly on nice days we'd get to that point in the split and look at each other and say, "We should go to Boston. Just play hooky and mess around." We'd both smile and laugh and then continue on our way to school and work because we were good kids and we did what you were supposed to do. We never played hooky.

Grad school the first time around

I've been packing the library. It is apparently the place things go to be forgotten. There were boxes that never got unpacked, just squirrelled away there. And even the stuff that did get shelved... Well I'm finding a lot of papers and notebooks from my time at Ithaca College. I've been skimming most of it before dumping it into the recycling. It's kind of entertaining. Here's what I have learned: I am not the person I was then.