As I go into my fifth month in the UK, I’ve started to realize that the big, underlying problem of being an American studying abroad has nothing to do with all the little parts of day-to-day life (for instance, cooking or laundry or buying essentials). It has everything to do with power. Or, as I’m coming to understand, a feeling of powerlessness that’s completely foreign to Americans used to being in complete control of their personal situations.

Last week, I was expecting delivery of a new bag from Timbuk2. The bag I bought last summer had a number of problems — including hinges that squeaked in a really annoying way when I carried the bag on my back, and a laptop compartment that wasn’t waterproof — and, after some intense negotiations with Timbuk2 customer service, store credit was issued and a new bag was ordered. Unfortunately, because the whole process of dealing with them was so protracted, I had to have the bag shipped to me in the UK.

After three failed delivery attempts to my apartment (my apartment manager, in his infinite incompetence, can’t manage to answer the front gate for deliveries that require signatures; which, in addition to his inability to fix our clogged showers or broken toilets, makes me wonder what, exactly, it is he spends his days doing, other than taking Wadham’s money and masturbating), UPS informed me that I’d need to collect the bag from their distribution center myself. In Headington. 17 miles away.

Were I in the United States, I would have either (a) sucked it up, driven to UPS, and collected my stupid parcel, or (b) called and complained loudly until a more agreeable resolution was reached. But in the UK, not only do I not have a car or the ability to easily go somewhere 17 miles away in an arbitrary direction, I also have a prepaid cell phone plan that charges me 20p (about 32¢) per minute for any calls, any time. For the same reason that my online banking still doesn’t work (calling to get it fixed is almost prohibitively expensive; I can see the Genius Bar appointments ticking away as I wait on hold), I was entirely unable to call UPS to handle what was a fairly straightforward delivery problem.

In the end, I went to the Sarah Lawrence program office and, on the verge of tears, explained my problem to the staff there. An hour later, my bag’s delivery had been rescheduled for the next day and to a different location where, without any problems, I was able to collect it.

But the original problems remain. When UPS, a week after delivering my bag, sent me an invoice for £24.14 in VAT and duties that I have to pay with my credit card over the phone, I was thrust back into the vicious cycle of having a customer service problem with no economically-viable recourse. (This isn’t even beginning to address the problem of how, after paying $50 to Timbuk2 for international delivery and fees, I still owe almost the same amount to UPS.) Mara wrote about the concept of “wasta” (which loosely translates to “influence”) in Oman as a determinant of whether or not you’ll get screwed over in everyday interactions; in the UK, it’s not “wasta” that I’m lacking, but rather a knowledge of to whom and how to cost-effectively express my concerns and exact resolutions to problems.

Living in the UK as an American is hugely frustrating, because the everyday expectations people have of you — things like having a driving license as proof of age, or a credit history for opening a bank account, or being able to use a phone that doesn’t cost thousands of dollars per minute — are things that, functionally, it’s difficult for me to manage. Over the years, I’ve become accustomed to a level of independence and savviness about how I conduct myself with regards to business, my personal finance, and transportation; being in the UK has completely turned that on its head. And, as I’m thinking about whether or not to come back here for graduate school, I have to wonder if it ever, really, gets better.

Apparently someone in SQU (the Swarthmore Queer Union) thinks I’m stupid. This, in and of itself, isn’t surprising, considering I dedicated my last post to a moderately facetious rant about why I think SQU is pretty stupid, too. (And, by the way, to the author of that comment: of course my parents don’t read my e-mail over my shoulder. They log into my MobileMe account directly and read it there. C’mon; give Mr and Mrs Roth some credit.)

But in the grand scheme of my pontifications about various organizations at Swarthmore, joking about kinky queer sex is probably unproductive, so here’s the bigger point of my last post:

Swarthmore goes to great lengths to advertise itself as a queer-friendly institution. One of the things that queer freshmen like talking about most, it seems, is the “Welcome Queer Specs” (that is to say, prospective students) banner that hangs from the Tarble bell tower during the annual open house weekend. It is assumed, therefore, that because we talk a lot about being queer, we’re obviously a queer-safe campus. This is not the case, and SQU is to blame for a number of reasons.

Coming Out Week. Every year, campus is overrun at some point during the fall semester with a series of extremely vulgar chalkings, as part of the Coming Out Week bacchanalia that, in some perverse way, is supposed to make people feel better about being proudly queer. The problem is, unless you’re already out and comfortable with your sexuality, Coming Out Week has the well-known effect of scaring the living shit out of you. My freshman year, for instance, I went chalking and, along with a straight female friend, wrote a list of every pet name for female genitilia that we could come up with. There was nothing constructive about this; it was publicly and unnecessarily vulgar. And while I’m the one blogging about it, I’m certainly not the only one to chalk something sexually explicit and decidedly un-queer-safe. (See also: the drawings of anal sex that make an appearance every year on McGill Walk.)

The point is, there is such pressure to come out in a particular, extravagant way, or to conform to some hysterical image of gay pride that more often than not, Coming Out Week is the worst possible time to actually come out. And, perhaps because of the lingering bad taste of Coming Out Week, or any of the various other aggressively queer events organized in large part by SQU, there are more than a few students who simply decline to come out altogether. This isn’t because they’re cowardly closet cases; it’s because Swarthmore’s queer community has made Swarthmore into a queer-unsafe space.

Sexual assault. Last week, I learned the word “swooping.” Apparently, it’s the upperclassman practice of taking advantage of the categorical ignorance of incoming freshmen re: queer relationships and queer sex. Freshmen, having endured the indignities of Coming Out Week, are thrust into a position where the little security they’ve managed to find for themselves and their identity is challenged by horny upperclassmen looking for an easy fuck. A friend relayed to me a story about a queer freshman who, having just come out, had sex with an upperclassman. The sex turned out to be violent and, when the freshman in question was bleeding for days afterwards and asked the upperclassman who was only too willing to take his virginity for advice, he got the answer: “That’s just how queer sex is.”

No, actually, that’s not how queer sex is. Let’s start with that.

My freshman year at Swarthmore, I ill-advisedly got trashed on my 19th birthday. It was a Thursday. After I was already drunk, a then-senior started hitting on me and handing me more drinks. Anyone with eyes could have seen that I was far beyond the point of giving informed consent. But I was lonely, and probably more than a little horny, so I went back to his room. Fortunately, my foolish decisions had a limit, probably because I fell asleep; but waking up the next morning in his bed, still drunk, I had to wonder: why did no one stick up for me? I take responsibility for my actions, including my drinking, but there is always another side to the story. It’s a side that’s uncomfortable to talk about, because it’s uncomfortable for anyone — and particularly for self-assured Swarthmore students — to admit. That night, I was taken advantage of because I was a stupid freshman and no one told me what to expect. And the two stories in this post aren’t unique.

When the issue of swooping was brought before the SQU Board, the group I referred to as “über-gays” who are responsible for organizing the group’s meetings and events on campus, it was summarily dismissed. Is swooping a uniquely queer issue? Absolutely not, and Swarthmore does a fairly good job with educating freshmen about sexual assault when they arrive. But it’s worth recognizing that freshmen who have just come out of the closet, or who are getting their first taste of queer life away from home and their parents, are in a particularly vulnerable position. And, I ask again: who’s sticking up for them? Ostensibly, it should be SQU. The only problem is, whether out of cowardice, or a head-in-the-sand reluctance to acknowledge that this is a real problem, or because the members of SQU Board are the ones doing the swooping, they don’t.

What it means to be queer. Identity politics at Swarthmore, ultimately, isn’t so much about what you are as it is about who you choose to affiliate with. A preponderance of various groups covering every inch of every possible spectrum — from the Swarthmore Womyn of Color Collective, which is pretty self-explanatory, to Small Group, a group dedicated to students in the process of coming out, to Enlace, a group primarily composed of Latin students, to Ikea, a group for Swedish enthusiasts of flat-packed furniture — is Swarthmore’s way to tell everyone, “There’s somewhere here that you should feel welcome.”

But Swarthmore has more students by a few orders of magnitude than it does organizations, and I think that SQU (and other campus groups) have forgotten that. The microscopic focus of many groups — in the case of SQU, it’s their core of we’re-here-we’re-queer rainbow-flag-toting chieftains — means that unless you happen to fit into one of a few dozen discrete and very hard-edged categories, you’re necessarily going to feel excluded. Certainly, no single group can or should comfortably include every queer student, or every woman, or every student of color; but the opposite shouldn’t be true, either. By focusing so particularly on one type of aggressively queer student (I don’t mean that in a sexual way; I just mean: very confidently out), SQU does a disservice to the rest of the queer population on campus.

Coming Out Week is just one example of how queer students are scared into the closet at a school that prides itself on being outside of it. When I first arrived at Swarthmore my freshman year, I put my name on the SQU mailing list because I wanted to find a place where I could share my thoughts about my sexuality with other intelligent, sensitive people who could relate to my experiences and contribute their own. I’ve found, after nearly three years on said mailing list, that SQU has failed to deliver, in a colossal way. Whether it’s a shortness of vision or too entrenched an image of what it means to be “the” queer group on campus, SQU does itself, the queer community, and the school at large a disservice by existing as it does.

So, no, to answer your question “youreuptight@swarthmore.edu,” I’m not going to remove myself from the SQU mailing list. But you (and presumably, the rest of the SQU Board) might want to consider it, if you’re failing to see what so many Swarthmore students have acknowledged: that your leadership, direction, and organization have failed us. For members of an institution that prides itself on being queer-friendly from the minute you get an acceptance packet in the mail, we deserve better.

I received the following e-mail from one of Swarthmore’s über-gays yesterday:

In a way, I think it manages to encapsulate quite nicely most of my problems with being gay at Swarthmore. Namely:

1. The tendency to over-analyze almost everything; see also, the “gender free orgasm” workshop that was part of the Sager Symposium two years ago.
2. The fact that there are groups on campus that honestly think it’s okay to spend administration money on organizing meetings telling students where to find kinky queer sex.

Don’t get me wrong: I respect a person’s right to engage in whatever kind of sex they want, kinky or otherwise; I just fail to see the need to hold a meeting to discuss it. My general opinion on the subject is, if you’re considering going to this meeting, you probably (a) already know what kinky queer sex is, and (b) already know where to find it. I have no doubt that students at Oxford are having exactly as much, if not more, kinky queer sex as Swarthmore students, and yet they don’t feel compelled to caucus on the subject. So, I ask again: what, exactly, is the point of this little get-together, other than to out fellow kinky queer sex enthusiasts to each other, making future Paces parties that much more horrific?

Also, where the fuck did anyone get the idea that it’s okay to have “Do YOU want to learn about kinky queer sex?” be the subject line of an e-mail? My parents would probably have stopped paying my tuition if that notification had popped up while they were around.

My parents have started using BitTorrent to download and watch episodes of Friday Night Lights, since they’re unable to watch it live because of their reluctance to pay for anything other than basic cable. As occasionally happens with BitTorrent, the most recent episode they were trying to download became corrupted and refuses to play after the first three seconds. I found myself, therefore, in the position of having to explain this phenomenon to my mother by e-mail:

— It’s corrupted. You’ll just have to redownload it.
— What do you mean “it’s corrupted”?
— It got messed up while it was downloading. There’s nothing you can do about it.
— But, what do you mean, “corrupted”? Why did it happen?
— I don’t know. Just delete the file and try redownloading it.

It occurred to me, after a few more volleys, that explaining the inexplicable corruption of BitTorrent downloads to my parents must be a lot like the experience of Louis Pasteur trying to explain to the people of the 19th century how microscopic germs caused their milk and wine to go bad. Corruption just isn’t something we’re built to understand, unless we have a vast conceptual framework explaining, scientifically, the full chain of causality between a well-ordered bottle of milk/AVI of Friday Night Lights and curdling/a kernel panic.

Since migrating the last parts of my Gmail account into MobileMe, I’ve been spending what little free time I have rereading old e-mail. And I have to say, it’s fascinating. A few things I’ve learned about myself through old e-mail:

• The oldest message in my Gmail account (though by no means the oldest e-mail I’ve sent or received) is a message my middle school Spanish teacher forwarded me with the subject “Words women use… men don’t understand!!” This, of course, is further validation that everyone in my life knew I was gay before I did. Moreover, the person she received the e-mail from — an assistant principal at my school — included a personal note when she forwarded the message: “I can’t believe I’m at work this morning!! My nephew and his bride were at my house until 2:00 this morning. I am still drunk I think!!” Quality role models.
• I sent a number of e-mails regarding an upstairs toilet in my parents’ house that, apparently, made a “really loud whining noise.” I can’t imagine why this was such a huge part of my life, but it even appeared in my 15th-to-16th birthday FutureMe letter to myself.
• Speaking of FutureMe, I found it (and a ton of other links that I liked to e-mail around) on this website FAZED that used to be relevant before all the other link-sharing websites (eg. Digg) became a “thing.” High on my personal list of other websites that used to be the shit and are now totally inconsequential: Plastic and everything2.
• Someone I think I went on a date with in 2005 — and who I also exchanged a number of very lengthy e-mails with, on the subjects of: Best Buy, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (the movie), and Ben Folds — recently resurfaced, in the form of a close friend running into him again. Small world. Also, I signed one of my e-mails to him as “One whose eyebrows wave every which direction,” which, huh?
• A lot of people used to get very upset with me for not replying to e-mails promptly enough. For that matter, they still do.
• Lurking in the not-so-distant past was a message asking me out on a date with the subject line “wraps for dinner?” which sounds sexy but totally wasn’t. Bonus points for anyone who remembers the failed relationship in question.
• Oh, and there was this old photo that I found back when I worked at FAU scanning books that I e-mailed to myself, which remains one of my favorite images:

Any further e-mail gems will be posted as they come up.

One of my ongoing projects for the last year and a half has been figuring out how best to export my tens of thousands of old messages in Gmail, and import them into my MobileMe account.

At first, I tried what seemed to be the most straightforward approach: since IMAP allows you to interact with mailboxes in different accounts and on different servers as if they’re local, I added both accounts (MobileMe and Gmail) to Apple Mail and  just dragged thousands of messages at once between folders. (Gmail labels are represented, in Mail.app, as folders.) This had a number of functional problems:

1. The nature of Gmail labels makes it such that duplicate messages were an inevitability. I used Gmail solely for a number of years, and got in the habit of using labels as they’re “intended” to be used — meaning, assigning multiple labels to the same message based on contextual relevance. Attempting to apply that fundamentally good idea anywhere outside of Gmail results in chaos.
2. The nature of Gmail’s threaded conversations creates a problem re: received and sent messages. Different mail clients handle Gmail’s threaded conversations and labels differently; based on my recollections from the last time I tried, Mail.app doesn’t include messages you send in the folder-label view, but instead only puts them in the Sent folder.
3. Dragging and dropping several gigs of mail at once is a useful visual analogy, but it reduces too many complicated (and bandwidth-intensive) processes into one step. In order for a copy like that to work, mail has to (1) be saved from Gmail to my computer, (2) copied from the local copy of Gmail to the local copy of MobileMe, and (3) uploaded from the local copy of MobileMe to the server. Drag-and-drop, in Mail.app, seemed to copy batches of mail into a cache of some variety, and then upload those batches directly to MobileMe. The end result was an unreliable transfer — a lot of messages were missing.

After letting the project rest for a few months, I decided to try it again last night. There were a few steps:

1. In the Gmail web interface, sort through all your relevant mail to ensure that it’s properly labeled. I could have transferred all my messages en masse, but since I value organization and only really want about half of my labels anyway, it was worth taking the time to label everything correctly. N.B. — This included, for me, labeling messages in Sent Mail; some of them were already labeled, since they were parts of conversations, but some messages I’d sent but hadn’t received threaded replies to were in Sent Mail unlabeled.
2. Add your Gmail account into Mozilla Thunderbird, with the default settings.
3. Click “All Mail” in the Thunderbird sidebar and let it “think” for a while. Thunderbird first downloads message headers and then, if it’s left idle for long enough, seems to actually download and index some of the messages themselves. The best way to ensure that it downloads everything in Gmail is to click “All Mail” and just wait for a while.
4. Once Thunderbird is idle, click the little computer icon in the bottom left hand corner to set Thunderbird to Work Offline. It’ll prompt you about whether you want it to save your messages for offline use — you do! If you only want to save certain folders, you can go into the Work Offline preferences and uncheck the folders you don’t want saved, but for simplicity’s sake, I left everything selected and let my computer download overnight.
5. In my case, Thunderbird seemed to get stuck on a particular label-folder a few times. I resolved this by quitting and reopening the app, and repeating the Work Offline process until it was offline and the app was idle (the cog in the top right corner stops spinning).
6. After quitting Thunderbird, open Mail.app and select “Import Mailboxes” from the File menu. Select “Thunderbird.” Navigate to your Thunderbird profile folder (typically in ~/Library/Thunderbird/, where ~/ is your Home folder) and click Continue. Check only those label-folders that you want to import — leaving everything checked off yields double-imports. Click Continue again and let Mail.app think for a while. N.B. — Thunderbird puts your sent messages in the label-folder that the conversation is a part of, so you don’t need to worry about importing the Sent Mail mailbox.
7. Once your imported mailboxes appear in the sidebar of Mail.app, navigate to the folder you want to copy to MobileMe, and, one folder at a time, move the contents to a folder listed under the name of your MobileMe account. I found that using the secondary-click “Copy To” option worked a little better than just drag-and-drop, which hung the app for some reason.
8. The Mail Activity window can give you a good idea of the progress of the upload, which can take any amount of time depending on how much stuff you’re uploading. But, assuming it doesn’t stop or freeze entirely, your mail will all end up stored remotely in MobileMe.

There are, of course, some drawbacks to this method:

1. Any unlabeled messages are excluded. If you import all your mail without labels from Thunderbird (using the /Gmail/[All Mail] mailbox that appears in the import window), this isn’t a problem, but if you choose to maintain your label structure, everything you want imported needs to have a label attached to it.
2. Your sent messages (as part of conversations or on their own) are going to appear in a folder that, by MobileMe conventions, shouldn’t contain sent messages. This doesn’t pose any kind of problem for viewing or searching your mail, and I find that it makes for a more intuitive mail-viewing experience, but it’s not technically “right.”

But, other than those two, this method has worked flawlessly for me. It’s circuitous, and I’m sure someone could find a better way to do it, but in terms of achieving the objective of moving messages from Gmail to MobileMe (or any other e-mail provider, for that matter), it works. And that’s what counts.

One of the aspects of online sociology that most interests me is the anonymity/troll effect, wherein otherwise (outwardly) reasonable people become complete assholes on the internet because they can hide behind a handle and not share their real name or contact information. This seems to suggest that people are, at their cores, ignoble savages, restrained only by the seeming Leviathan of tact, courtesy, and accumulated folkways that we’ve picked up after years of painstaking habituation.

Or, more bluntly: people are, fundamentally, all complete dicks, and only superficially aren’t.

Anyway, as someone who used to play World of Warcraft, the troll effect is something I’ve experienced firsthand on a number of occasions. But, lately, I’ve realized that there’s another side to the anonymity effect: the internet is also great for those conversations you can’t manage to have in person; see also, “The Talk.”

A friend recently e-mailed me a copy of her Talk with a newly-acquired boyfriend, which apparently took place over AIM. Following the transcript, she wrote, “This whole conversation happened online because that’s the only place he really feels comfortable talking… which is really weird for me.” And, come to think about it, it would be really weird to have, as a 21 year old, a serious and emotional conversation via gchat.

But that doesn’t mean that my natural inclinations don’t lean in that direction. As I wrote about in “The Talk,” I loathe having emotionally-charged conversations in person, for reasons that I can’t quite determine. For a while, I’ve been brushing it off as me being fundamentally uncomfortable with emotions, period, but I think a more nuanced understanding is needed: it’s not that I’m afraid of telling people how I feel; it’s that I’m afraid of telling them that in person. Or, put another way, I don’t think that I’d have failed three nights in a row to initiate The Talk if I were willing to have it over Messenger.

This all seems to ring a little childish, though. The first guy I was ever involved with, my freshman year of high school when I was the ripe age of 15, was a relationship that took place primarily over MSN Messenger. (This, I think, was mostly because neither of us could drive.) And, it turns out, emoticons are a poor substitute for emotions, as I no longer speak with the guy in question, and am actually repulsed that I came in physical contact with him every time he shows up in my Facebook News Feed. (He may have been defrienestrated. Not certain.) I proceeded to make the emoticon-for-emotions mixup again my junior year of high school. And each time, I had to relearn the painful truth that feeling something in ASCII and feeling something in person are very different concepts.

Now, though, I’m left wondering whether the “weirdness” that both my friend and I feel re: the prospect of The Talk over IM is residual skepticism left over from the heady days of chat rooms, Napster, and AltaVista, or something objectively wrong with that idea. What, in the end, is actually the problem with having The Talk online? Isn’t good communication still functional, relationship-ey communication if it’s happening over the internet?

Yeah, I’m not convinced either. But I’m not sure why.

Since bidding a fond farewell to the Apple Store last Friday (until next June, anyway), I’ve managed to occupy myself with two principal activities: baking, and perfecting my “breakup” playlist. Both are extremely delicate tasks.

As for the first, the whole project was spawned by a bunch of bananas I had sitting around that were about to go bad. Not wanting to throw them out, I found a Food Network recipe for banana bread and had at it. Having never baked anything before on my own in my entire life, the extremely positive reception of the banana bread at work started something of a frenzy. (In retrospect, I think that I could have served dog food on a plate, and my coworkers would have received it equally positively; everyone at Apple likes free food.) A week later, I’ve made the banana bread twice, a batch of good-but-not-amazing oatmeal raisin cookies, and a red velvet cake that tasted incredible but looked like a huge pile of crap. Baking, it turns out, is awesome.

The second occupation — the breakup playlist — has been an ongoing project of mine for the last five or six years. My stress-reducing activity of choice is reorganizing my iTunes library, so making playlists is something I do fairly often. And while I’ve never had a breakup dramatic enough to actually warrant an all-night bout of crying and playing the Virgin Suicides soundtrack on repeat, the breakup playlist has always struck me as a staple of every functional music library.

This time around, I set myself a few ground rules — all songs have to be lyrically linked to relationships or breaking up; no artist may appear more than once — and put together an entirely new playlist. The full version (available for download at the bottom of the entry) is 30 tracks, but here are the 10 highlights:

“Dry Your Eyes” — The Streets
“Don’t Turn Around” — Ace of Base
“Crown of Love” — Arcade Fire
“My Interpretation” — MIKA
“Before He Cheats” — Carrie Underwood
“Don’t Speak” — No Doubt
“She’s A Rejector” — Of Montreal
“Irreplaceable” — Beyoncé
“How’s It Going To Be” — Third Eye Blind
“Your Ex-Lover Is Dead” — Stars

I originally had planned on structuring this playlist around the five stages of grief/loss, but that ended up being sort of disjointed. (Feel free to reorganize the playlist according to that, if you want. I’d be curious to see if anyone can make it work.) Ultimately, I think I captured what I’d be thinking — and the order in which I’d be thinking it — pretty well. Thoughts and additions are, of course, appreciated.

Download! (244MB)