Indoctrinated As Straight

February 23, 2024February 23, 2024 GuillermoLeave a comment

“There ought to be a time in one’s adult life which is dedicated to rediscovering the most important readings of our youth. Even if the books remain the same (though they too change, in the light of an altered historical perspective), we certainly have changed, and this later encounter is therefore completely new.
–Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics?

90s Queer

I came out as bisexual in high school. To my friends, it wasn’t a surprise. We were outliers, the damned. The wretched of the high school hierarchy. My whole life, I tried to give a name to what stirred within me, flowed through my blood, lingered beneath my goose-flesh prickled skin. How could I explain to my mother that the same butterflies that fluttered in the cavity of my heart, squirming through my guts whenever I stood near my best girl friend also rose whenever the pink-haired gay boy pushed his lips against mine during gym class–possibly the worst class to not be straight in?

I don’t know if my mother understood what I meant. Or if she did and simply chose to ignore it, as if it was a condition that might go away on its own. Maybe she understood and quietly accepted it as most Latine parents are wont to do. It wouldn’t matter, because by the time I entered college, I no longer identified as bisexual; although, it was clear that I was anything but heterosexual.

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Books · School · Stream of Consciousness

Dear Gloria

February 15, 2024 GuillermoLeave a comment

What follows is a slight rewrite of a class assignment. The assignment was to write a response letter to “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers” by Gloria Anzaldúa which can be found in the pages of A Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, an anthology edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. Because I am a creature of habit, I did deviate from just responding to Gloria’s piece.

Dear Gloria,

I tried writing this letter in parts, hoping that it would sound more like a conversation. There was this urge to stitch your words with those of Cherríe Moraga as there moments in both that opened memories, conversations I had with others and those I overheard.

I tried writing this in parts, subsections (more like fragments) that were laced together with an intention of making sense in the end. This is normally how I write these blog posts; they are written as stream-of-consciousness. Sometimes they stay a disorganized mess which aligns with the scatter-brain methods of my thinking. Other times, I make an attempt to put order to the chaos. My brain, much like your floor, is lined with fragments—sentences wanting to become paragraphs wanting to become stories.

Maybe I write because I need the world around me to make sense. Or maybe because if I don’t, I may go mad with the voices that echo throughout my thoughts.

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Doldrums · School

End of Semester, Annotations, & Other Concerns

December 24, 2023December 24, 2023 GuillermoLeave a comment

Eminem Approach

Part of my anxiety about grad school stemmed from my fear of academic writing. Having been away from the classroom since my graduation in 2007, I haven’t written anything academic in a long time. Most of my writing dealt with reviews, blogging my day-to-day, and some press releases for my old job. And, of course, the occasional poem.

However, I managed to complete the semester without losing my mind. I did this by using the Eminem approach to writing (you think I’m joking, but I’m not).

While on set for the 8 Mile movie, it has been reported that Eminem would take time during breaks in filming to pen the lyrics to “Lose Yourself.” You can even see this process in the movie when Jimmy rides the public transit.

I wrote a little something every chance I got, jotted down the quotes I wanted to use to make my case, etc.

Annotations as Art

Like so many people, I have fallen down the rabbit hole that is Booktok/Bookstagram. I don’t aspire to become a book influencer. My brain is too chaotic to be that focused. I applaud those who can.

However, I began to question the book annotation aesthetics featured in videos and photographs. At a glance, I paid them no mind. But as my feed began to be saturated with annotations, a question began to nag at me:

Are people really finding that many interesting things within the two page spread?

While I don’t want to discredit anyone’s reason for “over” annotating a book, I’m beginning to see these as less a way to create marginalia (though it still exists), but as a way of creating art from an existing work. And this is not a bad thing–though a different, older me would have been aghast at the idea of writing in a book so liberally; I enjoy the style and feel of the photograph.

Am I alone in this?

Gluttony of Stress

At the encouragement of my professor (and the chair of the program I am in) I have applied for my school’s Gender & Women’s Studies Program (GWSP). The graduate program is a graduate certificate program which will work alongside my MA in Interdisciplinary Studies program in Mexican American Studies.

I toyed with the idea of one of my focuses (I get two) to be GWSP, but she encouraged me to go for both. I think she wants me to have an endgame where I teach, which wasn’t in my cards, but I am heavily considering it now.

That said, I may wind up writing a thesis so this is something I should look into now just in case.

Onward and Forward

Several months ago, I wrote a piece that I had every intent on publishing here. It’s a stream-of-consciousness piece, but I want to look into it again and maybe make it into something more autobiographical than fictional. While the autobiographical nature was in the piece, it wasn’t honest.

There’s this (anti) methodological approach that I learned about this semester: Nepantlando.

“Gloria Anzaldúa defines and conceptually marks the border as an ideological site she calls nepantla—a Nahuatl word that refers to a space existing in-between worlds. […] We situate Anzaldúa’s Borderland theory to the crossings in nepantla and identify ourselves as intentional border crossers, visionaries, as nepantleras. […] As nepantleras, we activate new processes for decolonizing our minds and bodies. As we traverse nepantla spaces, we seek opportunities for initiating what we call nepantlando. Nepantlando = nepantla (existing in-between worlds) + Spanish gerund (ando). We define nepantlando as an activated in-between space where within the gap, la rajdura, it is no longer a place of teetering precariously on the edge or straddling the in-between; but rather, a bridge is created, envisioned, summoned, and embodied by nepantleras as new possibilities through intentional acts that lead to transformation” (Sotomayor and García 292).

And I want to practice this form approach within my nonfictional, journal-writing especially on this blog. Stay tuned, I suppose.

Works Cited:

Piacquadio, Andrea. “Woman in Red Long Sleeve Writing on Chalk Board.” Pexels, 19 Feb. 2020.

Sotomayor, L. C., & García, C. S. (2023). “Nepantlando: A Borderlands Approach to Curating, Art Practice, and Teaching”. In The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art, Craft, and Visual Culture Education (1st ed., pp. 292–307). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003190530-37

Stream of Consciousness

“They were all in love with dyin'”

November 30, 2023 GuillermoLeave a comment

Back Pain & Dream State

Woman wrapped in plastic. Photo by Anna Shvets

I woke up with back pain this morning. The sensation seeped into my dream world, creating a moment in panic (both within and outside the dream) that my legs had given out. That they no longer worked for me. That sometime in the night, my spine had snapped and cut me off from my lower half of my body. As the waking world struggled to make sense of the information fed to me, creating a false memory – could almost remember the incident (accident?) that led to this sudden paralysis – the dream me accepted the news. Processed it. Understood it.

This is nothing new, though. You often speak of your condition. You have told stories of sleep paralysis since your childhood. Waking up while dreaming.

Identity

A couple of years ago, a coworker asked me for my pronouns. It was the first time I ever gave it any thought. In the time since, I have decided that being a “man” never truly suited me – long ago, I found comfort in my femininity, though I never longed to be a girl. I have an idea of how my masculinity should present itself. How I want to be addressed. How every time someone addresses me as sir, I reply – under my breath (or in my head) – “Don’t call me sir.”

“Are you trans?” a new coworker asks me.

Maladaptive Daydream

And do you often refer to yourself as a woman?

[I don’t often refer to myself as anyone, actually.]

But you’ve used a female moniker in the past.

[I have gone by many names in the past. A couple were female, yes.]

So you’re finally putting it together?

Hush now. It’s time to sleep.

It’s not that it’s a loaded question. Being an old queer, the word trans carries so much weight and history that it almost feels like appropriating the term. To my aging generation, to be trans means to transition from man to woman or woman to man. In the current climate, you are either cisgender or transgender, with the latter being an umbrella term for anyone who did not fit the role thrusted upon them or sees themselves outside of the binary.

But you can only be male or female. There are only two genders.

There aren’t even just two sexes.

Desert Highway

Mackie and Evelin sit on the hood of their car. The engine still running. Her rusty auburn hair catches the breeze. His scalp sweats.

Doldrums · School

Occupied Mind

October 30, 2023 GuillermoLeave a comment

Cottonbro studio. *“Person in White Shirt with Brown Wooden Frame.”* 2020, https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-in-white-shirt-with-brown-wooden-frame-4769486/.

I can’t even say that I’m not motivated to write. There’s so much clogging my brain that it’s impossible to sit still and map something out. There are review notes floating about, journal-esque entries, poetry to share, and a research paper that will probably never get written because the annotated bibliography assignment I’ve been mulling over isn’t going to lead to anything significant. At least, not yet.

Earlier in the month, I did something outside my comfort zone. And I haven’t written about it. I’ve also watched so many movies and listened to so many audiobooks. And not a single thing has been noted about them.

I promised myself that the blog wouldn’t suffer, but suffer it has.

I keep telling myself I’ll get around to updating this, but with readings and writings and class and parenthood and work, carving out a little bit of time when I’m not exhausted seems almost impossible. I hope to get better at it. I will. This was an adjustment semester. I swear.

Doldrums · School

Autumnal Update

September 28, 2023 GuillermoLeave a comment

I made a promise not to lose focus on my blog/reviews once school started, but obviously I haven’t kept that promise. There’s still two reviews I haven’t worked on (one for Babel by R. F. Kuang, and one for Elliot Page’s memoir). There’s also some poetry breaks that I’ve been meaning to post, and I’ll get around to those as well.

Reacclimating myself into academia wasn’t as easy as I hoped. A lot has changed since my undergrad years. I’m forty now with a full time job and I’m a parent. These aren’t easy things to juggle so it’s obvious one thing had to suffer, and that is my free time reading what I want. That said, I worked my way through some of Ruan Willow’s The Mardi Gras Unmasking (where the word sloshing comes up more than once causing me to – as Booktok says – DNF it). I’m still (re)reading Innocents by Cathy Coote, and I’m wondering how I even managed to get through that novel the first time. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not poorly written. It’s not even a bad story. And that’s what makes it so disturbing.

One thing that came from this time, however, is the Latinx discussion/essay (lyric essay?) that I started writing and hope to post on this blog in sections. That stemmed from a discussion in class over two pieces we had to read and I got a little passionate about the subject and how the argument for or against shouldn’t be made by people who aren’t truly affected by the label – in other words, when you’re a cisgender person, it’s hard not to center yourself when it comes to non-cis terminology (see: J. K. Rowling, every internet-”English major” crying about the plural used as singular). And I know this is ironic for me to even argue because I don’t identify as Latinx, but as Latine, nor do I consider myself trans in any sense (well, any sense of my own).

There’s so much that is pouring through my head right now even as I mentioned that. But I need to focus on my homework and class readings. I honestly don’t know how I can even begin to imagine taking more than one (that’s right, one) class a semester with this semi-burnout brain.

Here’s hoping.