Waffles

Yesterday, without warning, I made my students waffles in the midst of my English class. My son asked, “why? Why would you do this?” I asked him why he thought I would make waffles in English. He thought about it, then said, “To show them that you love them.” Yes, I told him. Once again, you have crystalized my thoughts.

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Support for Same-Sex Marriage by State and Age

I saw this on Helen Boyd’s blog, under the heading “The Waiting Game.”  Remarkable.

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15 Things Kurt Vonnegut said Better than Anyone Else Has, or Will.

This is a cross-post to a site called A.V. Club, but well worth passing on.  Text by By Scott GordonJosh ModellNoel MurrayTasha Robinson, And Kyle Ryan

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1. “I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’”

The actual advice here is technically a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s “good uncle” Alex, but Vonnegut was nice enough to pass it on at speeches and in A Man Without A Country. Though he was sometimes derided as too gloomy and cynical, Vonnegut’s most resonant messages have always been hopeful in the face of almost-certain doom. And his best advice seems almost ridiculously simple: Give your own happiness a bit of brainspace.

2. “Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”

The whole post is here.

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first look at interior sketches for Falcon Quinn

a very rough, preliminary set of sketches for the inside of Falcon Quinn and the Black Mirror.  Art by Brandon Dorman.

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Beware of the Blob

blob-poster-782025 Each year at this time I fall off of a cliff.  One minute I’m walking with my family through The Apple Farm, out in Fairfield, bathed in golden autumn light.

Then,  a minute later, all the leaves have been blasted out of the tree by a Nor’easter,  and it gets dark at four in the afternoon and there are guys in the woods with shotguns.

And there’s no more baseball.

The only thing that raises my spirits is the thought of the blessed holiday season ahead.  Christmas, you think?  Nope:  Halloween.

Sometimes it seems as if Halloween and Christmas have swapped places.

I don’t mind the fact that Halloween is getting more Christmasy all the time; that’s fine with me.  But the way in which Christmas is getting to feel more like Halloween?  I’m less crazy about that.

I have one neighbor who puts more effort into his Halloween display than his Christmas one.  He places a Grim Reaper in his front yard, complete with scythe.

At Christmas, he puts one austere yellow light in his two upper windows.

Last Saturday I went over to my friends Tom and Laura’s for the all-night jam in their barn.  I wore a gorilla suit for the occasion, which was hotter than you’d think.  We all sang songs together, and then we took “a cup of kindness, yet.”  For Auld Lang Syne.

On Tuesday night, I was up at Colby, just as I have been each October 31st for the last 19 years, reading ghost stories for the students with my friend Charlie Bassett in  Lorimer Chapel.  This year, in addition to Charlie and me, there were a number of singing groups, who joined me in a group performance of the theme song from The Blob.

Beware of the Blob! It leaps and creeps

And glides and slides along the floor

Beneath the door, it’s over on the wall

A blotch, a splotch, Be Careful of the Blob!

By the morning of All Saints, the Boylan household was exhausted from a month of disguise and celebration and the ingestion of a mountain of Kit Kats and Mars Bars and Chunkies.  We love Halloween.

Christmas, meanwhile, is a macabre holiday when the dead come back to haunt us.

It was Dickens, of course, who most famously observed that Christmas is the most haunted of holidays, and the older one gets, the more haunted it gets.  It’s impossible for me to set up the tree in my mother’s house, for instance,  without thinking of the Ghosts of Christmas Past—the father who isn’t there, the sister who doesn’t speak to me any more, all the memories of being a child, back in the prehistoric 1960s, when virtually all of my Christmases were Christmas Futures.

It’s become a cliché, now, for people to speak of their depression at Christmas, but it’s true.  So many of us at this time of year,  wind up  haunted by the ghosts of our younger selves, laid low, as we approach the end of another year, by a sense of the speed with which time slips through our fingers.

The only thing missing from Christmas, sometimes, is a Grim Reaper in your front yard with a scythe.

I love Halloween, and I love how happy my children are at this time of year.  Their wild energy makes me feel young again.

But is it too much to ask of this season, that Halloween return to October, and let Christmas be a season of light instead?    Would it be so crazy if this year, Christmas was a time of joy, of looking forward, of people celebrating peace, and love, and singing songs together?

It’s a nice wish.  But I have a funny feeling I already know what carol I’m going to hear, when I start, once more, to decorate the tree.

Beware of the Blob! It creeps and leaps

And glides and slides along the floor

Beneath the door, it’s over on the wall

A blotch, a splotch…

Be careful of the Blob.

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Thirty Seconds Over Wesleyland

060203wesleyanuniversitycon1. Woke up this morning amid the green fields of Yale University, where I’d performed my one-woman show, “The Porcupine Woman” the night before, and then went out with friend & writer Dani Shapiro, and husband Michael.  Drink, as they say in Ireland, was taken.

2. Got in the car and drove to my alma mater, Wesleyan University, in Middletown, CT, where I had breakfast at O’Rourkes Diner.  Owner Brian O’Rourke comes right up to me and says,  ”I remember you. Class of 1980?” I said yup.  He asked after my friends, as if it had been last week, instead of years and years ago, when last I had pie and coffee in the middle of the night at his diner.  I had eggs over easy, bacon, home fries, Irish soda bread, and truly fine coffee.

3. Then walked in a wide circle around the campus.  Down the old brownstone buildings of college row, over to my freshman dorm, back through the Science Center, where I paused for just a moment in the big lecture hall, where Psych 101 was in progress.  I stood at the back and remembered being a student in that room, remembered hearing people such as my own innocent, young self discussed during the class on “Abnormal Psychology.”

4.  Walked into a cafe and got a latte, where the woman behind the counter also claimed to remember me from 1979.  She said the school was richer now, but it had lost its “esprit d’corps.”

5. Walked up Foss Hill and sat down just by the observatory and watched the brown leaves of autumn swirl around me. And thought:  A)  Oh how happy I was here and young;  B) Oh how sad i was here, and young; C) Oh how I wish I were 20 again; D) Oh thank god I am not twenty again;  E) How lucky I was, to go here, then, when I did, and to know the people I did; and F) How lucky I am now, to be where I am now instead, here, in this life, at this moment.

6.  Walked through the Arts Center, into the old music building, downstairs to the practice rooms, where a dozen different people played a dozen different pianos. I pulled into one of them and played an F chord, and then a B flat.  Noodled.  And remembered noodles of long ago, same piano, same room.

7.  Got back in the car, got outta there, drove up to the big cemetery and looked all around at the blustery autumn, and remembered how beloved that graveyard was by dear, departed John Moynihan, my friend who used to appear out of nowhere, wearing a pirate costume, hand you a treasure map, and just as quickly disappear.

8. And then headed north, to Maine, and my family, and the days to come.

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Today, we get this.

Passed a fellow as I walked up the hill to work a couple days ago. Out of nowhere, he said, “True! We suffer all winter. But today, we get THIS!”

True that.
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“The Mountain” trail above Belgrade Lakes, October 2009.

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How Beautiful the Ordinary

9780061154980-1 It’s publication day for HOW BEAUTIFUL THE ORDINARY, a collection of stories of identity for young adult readers. My own story, “The Missing Person” is about being trans, and how it affected my life, and that of my family, when I was young. The collection contains work by lots of good writers, including Gregory Maguire of WICKED fame. Michael Cart, the editor, is a lovely man, a YA author and editor his own self. I haven’t seen any reviews of the collection yet, but I’m hoping the book gets around; it would be beautiful, and ordinary, if these good stories got through to young people in the midst of asking themselves the age old questions: Who am I? Why is love so hard? What is this world? What is this life?

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JB in Martha Stewart Living

I wrote this piece for Martha Stewart’s Living magazine, and it appears in this month’s (October) issue. It’s about the graveyards of new england, and the “art” that appears on the headstones. If you’re having a hard time reading the text, I believe you can double-click the images, which will take you to flickr, where under the “all sizes” tab, you can select “large,” and read’em that way.  Happy Halloween!

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A week in October

mass_bay_comm_college Well, with the Red Sox collapse complete, it’s time to head out on the road for two short talks this week. I hope anyone who’s interested in hearing me tell the same old jokes will consider coming on out. I’ll be doing a mix of new and old material at these two events, reading from my work and talking about civil rights for trans people– and everybody.

Richmond_Virginia-751407First one’s at Mass Bay Community College, tomorrow (Tuesday), from 11-12. Mass Bay’s in Wellesley Hills, Mass. The second one, on Thursday night, is in Richmond, VA, from 7 to 8, for the Richmond Human Resources Council. I’m not certain that the VA one is open to the public, so if you’re interested in this one, email me and I’ll see if I can make provisions for you with my sponsors.

IMG_0198Then home for dinner with Colby trustees, and dinner with friends on Saturday featuring a lord-of-the-rings trivia game. Plus, on Wed. night, during the 5 minutes I’m back between Mass. and Va., I’ll be in the audience watching my older son strut around the stage at his school for opening night of his play. Another action packed week.

Fall is peaking up here, the skies blue, the trees orange and yellow and red.  (Photo above is of Long Pond, just in front of the summer place, now pretty much sealed up unitl spring.) I spent part of the weekend splitting wood, and the smell of wood smoke is heavy in the air. Took out the screens from the windows. Walked the dogs up a mountain and looked down on all the colors of the world.

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  • 6821_527776843965_15401715_31443975_8145127_n

    Jenny Boylan's eleventh book, FALCON QUINN AND THE BLACK MIRROR, will be published by HarperCollins in May 2010.

  • PROFESSOR JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN is the author of ten books, including She's Not There: a Life in Two Genders, and I'm Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted, both published by Random House. A novelist, memoirist, and short story writer, she is also a nationally known advocate for civil rights. Jenny has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Live with Larry King, the Today Show, the Barbara Walters Special, NPR's Marketplace and Talk of the Nation; she has also been the subject of a documentary on CBS News' 48 Hours. She is a regular contributor to the op/ed page of the New York Times, and Conde Nast Traveler magazine. Since 1988, she has been Professor of English at Colby College in Maine; starting in 2010, she will also be the Hoyer-Updike Distinguished Writer at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania.

    Check out the Twitter feed at JennyBoylan; or join Jennifer Finney Boylan on facebook.

  • Blog Archive

  • The Boylan Family, fall 2007

    IMG_0181 "You hang around our family, you learn all kinds of stuff."
  • Will Forte as Jennifer Finney Boylan on “Saturday Night Live”

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  • Jenny with Barbara Walters, December, 2008

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  • Jenny atop Maine’s Mount Katahdin

    2036947979_34bfbec240 August, 2002.
  • Surrounded

    boylanWith President Clinton and Maine's Governor John Baldacci, fall 2006.
  • JFB and Edward Albee

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    Edward had been my teacher at Johns Hopkins in the winter of 1986. He visited Colby in fall, 2007. As we took our leave of each other, he kissed me on both cheeks and said, "We have done well. You and I."

  • Jenny and her teacher, the great John Barth

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    Jack was my professor at JHU when I did my thesis, back in the day. After many years, I can now confidently say I finally understand his definition of plot. Which is, of course, "the perturbation of an unstable homeostatic system and its catastrophic restoration to a new and complexified equilibrium."