i.                     

 A few stories, which I will tie together:

 1: My son was two weeks old when I took him for his first set of vaccinations. Two nurses pinned his little body down on a paper-covered table and jabbed his chubby newborn legs with four hypodermic needles at once. I’ll never forget the look of shocked betrayal he gave me (“Why are you letting this happen to me? I thought you loved me!”), just before he started to wail. However much I wanted to, it was impossible to explain to a two-week-old infant why I had to permit that kind of pain to be inflicted on him.

 2: On a winter day a few years ago, I was riding a downtown light rail train when I noticed that one of the passengers (female, middle-aged, African dress and skin color—most likely a member of the refugee community) appeared to be having a panic attack, desperately pushing the “open door” button to exit between stops. The train had just turned a corner, and she seemed convinced we were suddenly headed in the wrong direction. Both of us got off at the next stop, and she started pacing agitatedly up and down the platform, talking into a cell phone in a language I didn’t recognize. When I asked if she needed help, she grabbed my hand, pulled me to the edge of the platform, pointed down the tracks to the east (the direction in which the train had just departed), and asked, “Downtown?”

 Downtown was all around us, so I nodded yes. Then she pointed down the tracks in the opposite direction, from which we had come, and said “University,” the place she wanted to go. But that was wrong; the university was to the east, not the west. Someone must have explained it to her, probably the person she’d been arguing with on the phone, but she had gotten the directions reversed in her mind. Even though I had lived on that college campus and knew beyond doubt that she was wrong, the urge to agree with her mistaken idea was like a physical sensation, powerful almost to the point of being nauseating, because she was so desperate to believe it.

 I was able to help her get to the right place eventually, but that’s another feeling I’ll never forget.

 3: One summer day when I was about seven years old, I was visiting my grandparents’ house and stepped barefoot on a wasp—or maybe it was a hornet or yellowjacket, but definitely yellow-black and stinging—to which I turned out to be allergic. The allergy wasn’t life-threatening, but it was bad enough to put me in bed for the day with a painfully swollen leg.

 When I asked where my grandfather was, Grandma said he was out finding and destroying the bugs’ nest. I was awestruck by the idea that he not only cared about the bad thing that had happened to me, but was taking decisive (and, from my point of view, superhumanly brave) steps to make sure it never happened again. That was the day Grandpa started to grow in my mind from “fairly cool grown-up” to “family folk hero.”

  ii.                       

 I must begin by explaining that around my fourteenth birthday, my parents suddenly decided to get a divorce. I won’t try to describe how out-of-the-blue this was, or how much it hurt. Suffice it to say that (1) our family went from having a sincere-but-weak father figure to none at all, and (2) I responded, understandably, by projecting all my hopes for a happy, functional family into the distant future, when I would get married and have kids of my own. This wasn’t some vague or idle plan; as a young teenager, I consciously made it my purpose in life to succeed where my parents had failed.

 Within a year of the divorce, my grandparents moved into the house next to ours to help raise me and my three younger siblings while my mother worked full time. Grandpa—a retired telephone installer, RVer, and Pacific War veteran—became our new dad.

 He did the cooking (which he was really, really good at), acted as chauffeur, helped us with school projects, made terrible dad jokes, and filled every fatherly role with an effortless assurance my father had mostly lacked. He was caring, funny, genuinely interested in and dedicated to his family, and endlessly competent when it came to building or fixing anything we needed. (In ninth grade brought him a list of book-related projects for A Tale of Two Cities, told him I was going out with Mom for a few hours, and asked him to help me with the project over the next couple of weeks. By the time I came home, Grandpa—who was an amateur woodworker and did that sort of thing for fun—had constructed a working guillotine 18 inches tall from scrap wood, complete with a little Formica blade that could be dropped by pulling a wooden peg out of the top crossbar. I thought it would be a shame not to show it to the teacher. She gave me an A. -_-;)

 I don’t mean to leave my grandmother out of this, though she would be the first to point to Grandpa as the “fun one.” Both of my grandparents were incredibly hardworking, selfless people who became my new model for what a successful marriage should be like and how effective parents should function. If my parents had given me (even accidentally) a personality-defining motivation to have a family of my own, it was my grandparents who showed me how to make it work.

 I was about fourteen or fifteen when I began to realize my hormonal indicators were all pointing in the wrong direction—toward the attractive girls, the female movie and TV stars. I was, in fact, gay.

 (Yes, you read that right. I will pause for a few minutes while you round up some paper towels and all-purpose cleaner—I recommend Formula 409—to mop up the Monster Ultra Red you have just spewed all over your computer screen. Can’t help you with the keyboard, though. Sorry about that.)

  iii.                 

 Why, you may ask, did I never mention this before? I will explain as best I can.

 My biggest problem between the ages of about fifteen and twenty-two (that is to say, between 1992 and 1999) was that I was three-fourths convinced my dream of a traditional family was impossible. Having experienced life with a strong and loving father figure, with a weak and doubtful one, and with none at all, I had determined that the first state was by far the best—which made me a lesbian who not only wanted children, but had staked any future happiness on giving those children the best father I could find.

 “Problematic” indeed. As a young teenager, I already knew that what I wanted was anathema to the gay rights movement and everyone in it. While avoiding the high school bullies who speculated and aimed insults at my back about the reason for my utter lack of interest in guys (if any of those bullies happens to be reading this right now, congrats—you nailed it), I avoided the self-described revolutionaries just as carefully. With God’s help I was smart enough—barely—to be more afraid of progressivism’s acceptance than of anyone else’s rejection.

 So, like a child facing the inexplicable needle, I spent my teenage years lonely, confused, and in pain without really understanding why. I couldn’t look at my shattered family, imperfectly pieced together despite my grandparents’ best efforts, without thinking, If that’s “revolutionary,” then I want no part of it. But I refused to turn in the obvious (let’s call it the sensual) direction for comfort, because I had a powerfully traditional vision of my own future, and I knew how hard it would be to resist that of the revolutionaries, the activists, the “tolerant” types who would work their arguments under my skin to undermine the thing I wanted most. (I know my weaknesses, at least—remember the woman on the train whose emotional appeal almost convinced me, for a moment, that west was east?)

 No one forced these goals or these conclusions on me. On the contrary, I faced persistent opposition to them—particularly from my mother, who saw herself as something of a feminist revolutionary, frowned on my persistent churchgoing, and used to tell me “marriage wasn’t meant to last.” I stuck with my religion (LDS/Mormon, as I’ve mentioned once or twice before) long after the rest of my family abandoned it, because the things it told me about myself—that I had a choice about what I would be, that I could have the thing I wanted most if I would only follow God’s rules instead of the world’s—turned out to be true. 

Meanwhile, the movement that claimed the exclusive right to represent people like me gave me half-truths. For example: Being bisexual would, of necessity, involve two separate sexual awakenings. Nobody told me that they might take place years apart, or gave me a clue about how to stave off the effects of one while I waited for the other to kick in. I heard a lot of talk about the unnecessary struggle of trying to live an outmoded and restrictive religious code. Nobody ever suggested that the payoff might be worth it—that ten minutes with my newborn son would justify the years of struggle a dozen times over.

 I used to worry that children’s general lack of appeal for me meant I would be a bad parent. When I voiced that concern to one of my church youth leaders (a pretty young mother and the object of one of my first serious crushes… which is sort of funny in retrospect), she accurately predicted that my feelings would change completely when the kids were my own—an idea that had never occurred to me before.

 On the other hand, I was told every day, through dozens of media sources and the public school system, that babies were a burden (feminism), humans were a blight on the face of the earth (environmentalism), and the last thing the world needed was a new generation of imperialistic, resource-gobbling Americans (pre-9/11 transnationalism). Speaking from the other end of many years of imperfect-but-happy family life, I’m so glad I didn’t care.

 I spent most of my teenage years hanging onto my dream of a family by my fingertips and staying far away from progressives in general and the gay rights movement in particular--believing that they would only stomp on my fingers by trying to convince me that my determination to rein in a dominant sexual desire was the fruit of self-hatred resulting from superstitious patriarchal brainwashing… and so on.

 If reading all this is seriously raising your blood pressure, think of it this way: Would you ever, under any circumstances, say to a lesbian friend, “Hang in there! You’ll find your man!” If not, then how can you blame me, who needed to hear exactly that, for sticking with the only institution I knew that would back my traditional-family ideal to the hilt—even if it came, as mine was always going to, at the direct expense of alternative arrangements?

 I grew up in a home where the “alternative” was the norm. To put it mildly, I didn’t care for it. I’ve spent the past two decades quietly rebelling against the rebellion, carving out my own alternative to the alternative. I’m putting this out there now because living in this world feels more and more like being a recovering alcoholic at a party where people are constantly trying to spike my ice water with vodka, then sneering and calling me names when I refuse to drink it. If I’m going to spend the rest of my life with a bullseye on my back for being insufficiently progressive, I’d rather know the worst before my livelihood/voting rights/physical freedom go on the line.

 The question that really piques my curiosity is this: Does the new social order have room for a person like me—gay and Christian, valuing the former only as it presents opportunities to show my devotion to the latter? Or will I have to fight for the right to interpret my own life experiences as I see fit, let alone talk about them in public?

life is kinda cool right now. I’m near the end of my semester, but I think I might get better grades than I anticipated. I’ve also become much better of a musician and I’ve played the most shows I’ve ever played in the past 2 months than I have ever played. And in about 8 hours, I get to see Nightwish and Sabaton in concert!

Creatively, I’ve been hitting some nets, though. I wrote about 60 pages of a novel I was writing, but that hit a snag when I realized that writing in perspective of a 14 year old girl going through chuunibyou is really tough. I could write about a guy if I wanted to, but I like girl characters better. On the bright side, it’s the longest thing I’ve written. That’s one hell of an accomplishment. Drawing hasn’t been much more forgiving.

And now for the part you’ve all been (allegedly) waiting for, the details of my Fanime 2015 visit. I’m thinking about setting up a fanime jam session near the end of the night on saturday or something. IT’s mostly a folk project where we bring whatever instruments we have and jam to the lead sheets of various songs from both anime and real life. I call it “Tennessee Valley Jam Authority”, no relation to the actual Tennessee Valley authority from the great depression. I just wanted to jam over Anime songs while giving it an americana/folksy/roots ring to it. Hope to see you all there!