So I'm relying pretty heavily on Dilemmas of Desire for my final paper in Sociolinguistics because it is only of only three academic sources that include the narratives of Latina teens talking about their own sexuality. Anyway, in one section a Latina teen who "vigilantly controls her sexual feelings" tells about how she stays away from dancing reggae with guys because it makes guys hard and girls horny and the something snaps in them and they say, "oh let's go to the bedroom." 

At first, I had to giggle a little, because, while I don't go around perreando these days, there was a time in my life I did and the idea of me moving from the dance floor to a bedroom because of that is pretty far off. (I know I'm not everybody.) Even after I grew up a little and started working at Identity, I wholly supported dancing - even close body-to-body dancing - as a way kids could enjoy each other without danger. But then I remembered.

The last retreat that I attended with Identity, we ended up allowing the kids to have a "party" in one of the houses. Obviously, my co-facilitator and I were there. And at first I had no issue with the closeness, but at some point I blinked and saw two or three girls touching the ground with their hands while the guys behind them held their hips close and I just started blushing like crazy. Feeling like a bizarre 1950's chaperone, I ran around the room straightening girls up and making space between partners. Now my JOB was to chaperone, so this isn't totally unreasonable, but where IS the line? And who determines it? What makes one kind of closeness acceptable and another dangerous?

I still smile and shake my head thinking of that trip. Soon after, I kicked all the guys out to their own house and a bunch of the kids threw a fit. I wasn't having it. Until that point I had been afraid that if made to choose between what I thought was correct and what would make me popular I might cave, but I had absolutely no sympathy for their fury and even smiled to myself when I heard some girls bitching about me amongst themselves in their room. I went in and explained myself anyway, and soon after I had a line of girls (and even a boy or two avoiding going to sleep) knocking on my door and apologizing.

Here, doing research quite literally on my couch instead of "in the field," I am enjoying myself and learning a lot. Part of me really misses the joy of the drama, the intensity, of adolescent lives (seeing and supporting them, not living it), but I realize now that, although I can certainly do it, I have no interest in being a chaperone again. When I enter the field from here, my role will be different from what it was at Identity, and that is nothing but good.

Immigration is an incredibly complicated issue. It seems that there is no good answer. For me, the questions raised by the multitude of undocumented people in this country are primarily social justice concerns. And even if I do not have an emotional reaction to the idea of a border-wall (except, perhaps, of disdain), I do appreciate that there must be some way to regulate immigration into the country, lest the influx overwhelm the resources of the system. Which leads to the point that citizens of the United States are paying for those resources, and their objections are valid even if I strongly disagree with them.

The point that seems most defensible is not my emotional response of social justice or the xenophobic response of so many people I know. The point is, as Bill Richardson explained first and Barack Obama jumped on, one of public health, safety, and (beyond their specific point relating to drivers' licenses) success. If we don't provide access to health care for everyone, we risk an unhealthy underclass of citizens who - not living in isolation - threaten the health of the "rest of us". If we don't provide drivers' licenses, we risk more hit and run drivers. And, to extend it perhaps farther than our politicians are willing, if we deny educational opportunities, we are ensuring that the best and brightest will never be more than unskilled workers thus decreasing our comparative advantage in the cutting edge of science, technology, and even academia. The last one is why legislation like the Dream Act is so crucial.

I am pleased that Hillary Clinton supports the Dream Act, though disappointed about her flip on the driver's license issue. I am glad that Barack Obama's rhetoric for cracking down on employers of undocumented workers is to protect the "people living in the shadows" rather than to somehow protect the American people from those baddies, the scary immigrants out to steal their job. I am very glad that Barack addressed the emotional fear-laden response so many people have to the topic of immigration. I wish that it weren't political suicide for people to come out more unequivocally against the fear-mongering hype that extremists like the Minutemen have created against the refugees they have so effectively criminalized.

Ancient Greek virgins. Sounds crusty. It was my topic for my five minute audition at the Princeton Review this evening. I arrived almost ten minutes late, even though I left my house over half an hour early, but I don't think it mattered too much. I also ended up paying $7 for 37 minutes of parking. My presentation followed one on defensive patterns in soccer. He faced the board the whole time and lectured. I got three of the four people present up to participate as visual aids. I also had pictures of Athena, Artemis and Hestia - the three goddesses I was using to demonstrate my point. I actually wrote a little something on my website's blog when I got home, more or less explaining the points I tried to make in my audition. I had fun. I am pretty darn sure they'll hire me. I think they'd be foolish not to, with my teaching experience and my scores on the tests (if not their practice test).

I got a call earlier today from one of my Identity kids in tears. She asked me to come over, and I almost dropped everything (including the interview) to do it. Instead, I went after. Thank goodness. The girl's been through a lot of crazy junk in her life - it doesn't help that her dad was recently being held in a border prison in Texas, or that he was deported to a country where he had testified against military men currently holding power - but when I arrived and asked what was going on, her answer was that she wasn't allowed to borrow the car and her older brother was. Sure, she's overstressed and tired because she works seven nights a week and goes to school during the day, and her mom is having trouble coping and finding work because she's too honest to lie about her legal status. Plus, the real issue is a breakdown in communication, not the car. But part of it is just being a teenager. Which is somewhat reassuring.

I want to start looking for volunteer work in anthropology. I've looked at a couple of museums in the Smithsonian (like the National Museum of the American Indian - super cool cuz it's working with living cultures), but I can't really come up with much beyond that. Any ideas, buddies?

My passion has always been for myth. Not simply reading, but stories that were meant to be shared as a group. As I got older this conflated with a desire to better understand questions of identity, a question that seemed wholly pertinent to life in a place as incredibly diverse as Silver Spring, MD. Influenced by a feminist mother and transgendered father, my childhood and adolescent interests tended towards the experience of women. This took on form first in the creation of www.paleothea.com when I was 13 and was formalized when I had the incredible luck to work with Kirk Ormand on Classical gender and sexuality and with Thomas van Nortwick, who connected the ancient studies of gender with contemporary voices. But despite the diverse environment I was raised in, it wasn't until I was 18 and found myself working in an environment where I was the only U.S. native and the only white person for me to identify a connection to my broader community. It was then, as I learned Spanish from my coworkers that I began to find myself collecting their stories. These relationships would eventually help me to make my first ethnographic film for a Latin(o) Studies class. It was also then that exclamations like, "I've got to be an anthropologist so I can learn more about these stories!" started to pop up in my journal. After taking enough college Spanish to allow me to study in Mexico, I entered a program with the intent of learning Nahuatl and digging into indigenous myth. Instead, I found myself learning more and more about lucha libre, and Barthes had already taught me not to undervalue that so I paid attention.

Since second grade, I have always deeply enjoyed all things school-related, but as my senior year ended I found myself more engaged and interested in academics than ever before. Thinking that it was early withdrawal and perhaps a fear of leaving the comfort of study, as well as being genuinely interested in giving back some of what I had received, I decided that I would not continue my studies. After a blissful summer designing and teaching a mythology and identity course to motivated inner city kids, I settled down to a job working with immigrant Latino youth at an organization that I seemed destined for: Identity. I threw my heart and soul into the work until I burned out, and then I kept working until I had surfaced again with a new level of appreciation for the job and the community. It was only then, completely consumed by a job I loved and able to fully understand my love for the people I was working for and with that I began to see that what I was missing. There was no longer the tiniest hint of doubt that I needed to spend the rest of my career working in academia and studying the interplay of myth and culture, but the knowledge meant I could no longer effectively do my job. And so I quit my position as program manager to work at Borders part time and spend all of my energy on achieving my goal of getting a PhD in anthropology.

I am excited to be getting closer.

Yesterday was my last day at Identity. I had a lot to do and the computer was being a bitch, so I didn't leave the office until after midnight. I still have to go back and drop off some materials I didn't take out of my car (cuz it was late and I didn't want to be lugging around big boxes right next to the Wheaton metro - not terribly safe), but I'm trying to think of a time when I can go and do that without anyone seeing me. I said my goodbyes and I finished what I could, and now I just want to be done.

Guille wants me to get seriously to work today on all the school responsibilities that I have been putting off, but I really want to put them off just one more day ... just one day of vacation. I'll be at Borders over the weekend and will come home and start working then, so it's not SO bad that I take this one day to be a lazy bum, right?

Right?

I'm feeling okay right now. Not sad, not hurting, just avoiding.

Fuck, the building's fire alarm just went off. Gotta go.