Everyone must play
Jun. 19th, 2004 10:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lapsedmodernistInspired by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
of_the_refrain, I bring you this.
You have raised a lovely daughter. She is now a senior in high school. She is named Rebecca/Georgia/Emma/Mayday/Raindrop/Apple Martin(i) depending on whether you are named Sara/have D.A.R. blood in your family/are an anglophiliac Austen fan/have an atavistic allegiance to the CP and a misguided fondness for names of the social realism variety/are a fucking hippie/are Gwyneth Paltrow. Your daughter says "mom/dad, I'm a lesbian" right around the time the leaves start to turn and the college brochures start arriving in your mailbox. Please respond to the poll below and explain your decision-making process in the comments section. Write neatly and don't forget to label your work.
[Poll #310254]
of_the_refrain, I bring you this. You have raised a lovely daughter. She is now a senior in high school. She is named Rebecca/Georgia/Emma/Mayday/Raindrop/Apple Martin(i) depending on whether you are named Sara/have D.A.R. blood in your family/are an anglophiliac Austen fan/have an atavistic allegiance to the CP and a misguided fondness for names of the social realism variety/are a fucking hippie/are Gwyneth Paltrow. Your daughter says "mom/dad, I'm a lesbian" right around the time the leaves start to turn and the college brochures start arriving in your mailbox. Please respond to the poll below and explain your decision-making process in the comments section. Write neatly and don't forget to label your work.
[Poll #310254]
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-06-19 01:15 am (UTC)(I'm not keen to have kids, and have never been in a relationship with someone who was. But I'm looking forward to my brother and sister-in-law producing a few nieces and nephews, on whom I can be a bad influence.)
no subject
Date: 2004-06-19 07:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-22 06:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-22 08:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-19 05:52 am (UTC)Oberlin - maybe, i almost went there because my episcopalian dyke priest had a flamingly gay son who had preraphaelite red hair (her name was vesta, he was charles) who was a voice major there.
Vassar - know nothing
Reed - my flaky hippy longdistance almost boyfriend from a summer school in highschool went there. he had cute handwriting, but being more than a foot and half taller than me was hard to kiss.
Smith - nothing could be worse for a developing queer identity than going to this school. as much as i love where i live, and as much as i have a friend who attends smith that i adore, i wouldn't wish this hotbed of neurosis and confusion on anyone.
Mt. Holyoke - maybe if her name was Emma, Rebecca or Georgia.
Hampshire - i have this childlike belief in education, so no.
Brown - maybe. if i had been a firstborn son, i would have had to go here.
Wellesley - maybe, but i'd have to burn her sweatersets when she came home.
no subject
Date: 2004-06-19 07:23 am (UTC)b. Wait, how tall are you? How tall was the boy in question?
c. I know little about Smith aside from the requisite lightbulb jokes. Why is it worse for a developing queer identity than other East Coast liberal all-girls schools?
d. Hampshire: ouch and touche. Mostly latter.
no subject
Date: 2004-06-19 11:21 am (UTC)b. five one. six seven.
c. i was heavily considering smith in highschool, went to a class there and almost walked out, it was that obnoxiously competitive. (in a way brynmawr hadn't been). as a bisexual woman, since moving to northampton, the only women i've been involved with have been from outside the valley, because smithgirls and smithalum all seem to be crazy and selfrighteous about their orientation.
d. when i moved to the valley, my roommate, also a swattie, were out driving around for no particular reason and passed the hampshire campus. someone had painted quotation marks around the word college in the hampshire college sign. to this day, it remains funny.
no subject
Date: 2004-06-19 07:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-19 06:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-19 07:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-19 07:32 am (UTC)You forgot to include Sarah Lawrence on your list, no?
no subject
Date: 2004-06-19 07:50 am (UTC)Oral Roberts is creepy, but not as creepy as Bob Jones University with its insane contraversies over whether interracial dating is verbotten in the Bible.
I agree with you on Stanford and Yale; from what I know of them they are fairly good about diversity despite being "old money" schools. I mean, my impression is that they are better than places like Dartmouth or William & Mary. Where I hope my children will never, ever want to go.
no subject
Date: 2004-06-19 10:01 am (UTC)I don't have a single bad thing to say about Yale, except that they did let that Bush girl in. One of my friends was her TA for an architecture class she took, and apparently she was significantly less than brilliant (go figure). Yale gets a bad rep b/c of the secret societies and stuff, but the undergrads I knew who were in Scull + Bones were 1. a queer girl from a definitely not upper crusty background, and 2. a black guy. Okay, that's not like super diverse, but the myth of the super wasp-y stuff I think is only a myth at this point. Actually, I think there is probably greater conspicuous consumption/retarded attidutes about money/class at a place like Vassar that can't offer as much financial aid and seems to be fed by a lot of nyc elite/expensive private schools.
And yes, I think you were probably better off at Oberlin than Sarah Lawrence from what I know about the two schools. I know maybe 7 or 8 people who have gone to SL, and I think that most of them have had a hard time integrating their college experience (both personally and academically) with the rest of their lives, if that makes sense. Two of them also picked up nasty heroin habits while there.
Schools that scare me: Princeton, UVA, Dartmouth (though everyone I know who went there is great), Vanderbilt
School that I wished I had checked out: UChicago
God, this sounds like a meeting with my college councellor.
no subject
Date: 2004-06-19 09:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-19 09:48 am (UTC)Only vaguely related:
Have any of you ever been to the dishware store Fishs Eddy? Last time I stopped in, they were selling Bob Jones University mugs, which were displayed in a basket alongside a placard announcing, "A portion of the proceeds from the sale of these mugs will go toward fighting bigotry."
no subject
Date: 2004-06-19 02:03 pm (UTC)Wow, that just blew my mind.
Was it a joke? Or is this Bob Jones post-integration mea culpa? I don't understand, are they real Bob Jones mugs?
Do the profits really go somewhere?
no subject
Date: 2004-06-22 06:06 am (UTC)Matronizing?
Date: 2004-06-19 11:35 am (UTC)p.s. : I don't know anything about those schools anyway. Sorry. And my parents took the same laissez-faire attitude that I endorse above, which I think worked swell. Wasn't trying to argue.
Re: Matronizing?
Date: 2004-06-19 01:41 pm (UTC)Re: Matronizing?
Date: 2004-06-19 01:57 pm (UTC)Re: Matronizing?
Date: 2004-06-19 01:57 pm (UTC)Re: Matronizing?
Date: 2004-06-19 03:24 pm (UTC)My gut response to the question was "but my parents always let me decide". Y'see, my parents were surprised that I even wanted to go TO college, so it rubbed me the wrong way - you, hypothetically, deciding where to send your theoretical daughter to, and I responded to that, instead of the light-hearted call of the question, because that response was something that I could talk about.
I was just being a berk. Sometimes I suck at livejournal*. If you were miffed, I apologize.
*you can use this statement against me in the future.
Re: Matronizing?
Date: 2004-06-20 09:44 am (UTC)Re: Matronizing?
Date: 2004-06-20 11:29 am (UTC)Whew! Also, I think that people on the internet will more easily believe that the other person is being dismissive or accusative or argumentative or caustic than the writer intends to be. There was an anonymous comment to me recently that read "You're so Metro." And, who knows if that's a compliment or an insult?
re: my comment to the anthrochica - I re-read my post and thought: yes, if you didn't know that chelvis is taking the absurdist stance, you would read this with a jaundiced eye and take umbrage. That's my fault, as there was no clear indicator early on that I was kidding. As I said above, I don't know how to (nor have I really seen it done) slip in that subtle hint with style, and any opprobrium was warranted.
But, basically everything I write on LJ is just a load of crap anyway. Because the internet is absurd. I mean, I just looked at your LJ, and you're in freakin' Canada. I'm in Flatbush, a shitty part of Brooklyn, New York, and your in British Columbia! � and that's bonkers. So, we don't even know who we are speaking to, on the internet, and we can't tailor our responses accordingly - you might be a narcoleptic war criminal, and I might be a Aboriginal Star Trek fan. I�m sorry for bringing up International Criminal Court like that. Insensitive, I know.
In any event, I appreciate your initial comment to me for it's sincerity, and this one as well. Later.
-"chelvis"
Re: Matronizing?
Date: 2004-06-20 11:48 am (UTC)Hahahaha, that is inspired. It should be the new livejournal manifesto.
no subject
Date: 2004-06-19 11:40 am (UTC)FYI, when she says, "Pop, I'm gay," I'm not going to say, "Welp! Time to ship you off to Liberty!/to BYU!/to The Island of Doctor Moreau!"
My perfect angel of a lesbian daughter will not be harmed by being sent away to a college filled with Andover graduates - this would also harm Daddy's pocketbook, and Daddy has loans to pay off. Furthermore, it's not necessary to pay all that cizzash. So off she goes to public schools. But see, then again, I'm not sending her to Sam Houston either. No place with "ways" about my little angel's kind.
It'll be a hard choice. I may have to resort to sending her to "the most diverse college campus in the country," good ol' GMU.
no subject
no subject
Date: 2004-06-20 11:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-20 03:41 pm (UTC)We don't need to fight dinosaurs anymore.
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no subject
Date: 2004-06-19 02:17 pm (UTC)tell me you know which one.
I love my dead gay son
Date: 2004-06-19 02:53 pm (UTC)"How would he feel about a limp wrist with a pulse?"
Date: 2004-06-19 03:04 pm (UTC)Re: "How would he feel about a limp wrist with a pulse?"
Date: 2004-06-19 10:34 pm (UTC)I remember there being a random Homer Simpson quote telling Lisa to stop Vassar-bashing in that hilarious Homer way where he is inexplicably disciplinary even though he obviously has no idea what Vassar is. Someone mentioned it on lj a few days ago, but I can't remember who.
Re: "How would he feel about a limp wrist with a pulse?"
Date: 2004-06-20 09:40 am (UTC)Re: "How would he feel about a limp wrist with a pulse?"
Date: 2004-06-20 11:45 am (UTC)The most famous one was in that overrated book "The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing"
no subject
Date: 2004-06-20 07:13 am (UTC)Pussies.
no subject
Date: 2004-06-20 11:44 am (UTC)Re: I'm new here, but are you an Obie?
Date: 2004-06-22 11:40 pm (UTC)Do you know the connie that
no subject
Date: 2004-06-23 11:05 am (UTC)