Contemplation on a Return to Church

I think I'm going to go to church tomorrow. That is, attend Sunday sacrament services of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (you know, the Mormons).

This may come as a shock to those of you who know me and who are familiar with my views about the LDS Church. I haven't gone to church in a long time because I just don't believe in it anymore. I don't think that the Mormons generally and proactively spread evil from the pulpit (excluding the few months when the Church mobilized its members during religious services in support of Proposition 8 in California). The last time I went, I think I was mostly pissed off that whatever the speakers had been droning on about was (from my East-Coast-liberal-secular perspective) logically unsound, ideologically driven B.S. Actually, come to think of it, I can't even really remember the last time that I went to church. It might have been sometime in college; I know I've never gone since graduation. So it's been at least four to five years.

Intellectual disagreements aside, one of the biggest reasons why I haven't gone to church is because, since the passage of Proposition 8, I had made a vow to never again step foot inside another LDS building. There's no real logic behind this principle, I suppose. I don't give the Church money automatically by entering the chapel. I guess if crowds and crowds of people were watching, the sight of me entering the chapel might constitute a tacit endorsement of the Church's policies and practices. But given that the chapel of the my local congregation (the Mormons call it a "ward") is set back some distance from a quiet, residential street on a hill at the edge of town, there's really no chance of that happening. What motivated the vow, then, was probably mostly anger: I imagined that it would most affect and be a statement to my own family, especially on my mom's side, of whom about half are practicing Mormons. Should they choose to host their celebrations (especially weddings) in a Church building, I would simply decline to attend: they won't have to celebrate my potential union, and I won't celebrate theirs.

All I can say is that anger ebbs and flows.

But why, really, go to church tomorrow? There are a few plausible reasons:

1. I'm bored, and my mom has the car anyway.
2. I'm interested to see what the Church is teaching these days, not so much in the sacrament meetings which are mostly reduced to catering to the lowest common denominator, but in the adult Sunday School and priesthood quorum classes.
3. I have many family friends whom I enjoy seeing and whom I haven't seen in a while (and whom, to be honest, I might not get to see for much longer given their age). It's a part of my background, and I still feel at home in that environment.
4. I secretly like the idea of making people uncomfortable and awkward knowing that a gay man is mingling with them in their place of comfort.
5. Some part of me thinks that it could be a small act of covert activism. By now, most members of my old congregation probably know that I'm gay and no longer active in the Church (my mom has thankfully spared me the pain and anguish of having to personally execute this information process). Maybe there are a few (or even just one or two) kids who are questioning their sexuality, and their families have warned them about this dangerous alternative lifestyle and pointed to certain other examples of the wayward path from the congregation. Maybe I will have played some part in these cautionary tales, and the kid(s) will see me tomorrow in the flesh as a functional, self-reliant, and openly gay man who is comfortable walking around Mormon-folk and, more importantly, living my life in a way that seems fulfilling and happy. And maybe they'll derive some hope from that sight.

I realize that these are all completely selfish and even self-important reasons. But, hey, these people are all going to church with the hope of gaining eternal salvation as gods in their own right, so who's being more selfish and self-important?

In any case, I've ironed my button-down shirt and slacks (there are oddly colored stains in the crotch area of my pants from various lunch-related spills at work; I hope my blazer will cover them). Maybe I'll wake up tomorrow and decide it's not worth the mental effort and the social charades to play nice for three (three!) hours.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Greetings from California!

Gosh, it's been a while since I've written. And no wonder: between the Divas concert in June, finishing work, and moving out of our place in Cambridge, it's a miracle we'restill standing. Rather than sit around on my ass in Wellesley, however, I decided that I would take the month of July to come out to California instead and see family before I recommit myself to another 5-year stint on the East Coast.

I arrived on Thursday night and was immediately reminded why I love this part of the country: evenings in the summer, after the sun goes down, are at most 65 degrees and crisp. I walked out in a polo shirt and shorts and actually had to put on my fleece vest to stay warm. I had, of course, just come from Boston which had been consistently hot and humid for the three previous days. It was a welcomed break.

My chief concern while I'm in California is that I will get restless while I'm at home. I know myself enough to know that if I sit around too much with family I'll get frustrated because of the independence and flexibility to which I've become accustomed in Boston. To counteract this risk, I spent parts of Friday and Saturday in San Francisco and Berkeley, respectively, exploring and catching up with friends. Here is a photo of me lounging on Memorial Glade across from Butler Library while reading The Time Traveler's Wife.

It was hard while lying in such glorious sunshine not to think about the what-if's of my graduate school choice. I could play tennis 365 days of the year here! But, alas, the choice is made, and I know that Columbia is the right place for me to start my career as an historian.

But still. Look at that vast expanse of green grass.

OK. Enough of that before I go crazy.

On Sunday afternoon, my mother and I drove down to Salinas, California. Salinas, as the more literary among you may remember, is the birthplace of John Steinbeck. Nowadays, it's a little strip-mall-cum-farm-town in the Central Valley that, frankly, I would never visit if were not for my family.

My brother, his wife, and his father-in-law live with two young children in a small, gated development in Salinas. The condo is a 2-level, 3-bedroom unit with a detached garage and small, enclosed patio. Even in the short 36 hours that I've been here, I'm reminded of the vast differences between his and my life. The obvious one are the children: while I love kids, I don't imagine for a second that I could somehow shoulder the responsibility of providing for two of my own in one year's time (I'm exactly one year and three weeks younger than my brother). Instead, I'll be gallivanting around one of the most expensive cities in the world, reading day and night, eating cheap ethnic food, waiting for student-rush tickets on Broadway, and stopping in on world-class museums on their once-monthly free days. By comparison, my life seems carefree and, well, almost selfish. What's funny to me is that, when we were growing up, my brother was always the one who broke the rules, while I was the one who followed them to a T. And now, he's the faithful husband, father, and small-businessowner with a mortgage while I live in sin with another man in Manhattan.

All this is to say that one can never tell: people change; priorities change. If history were any indication, I should be the one with the kids and the wife and the mortgage.

Thankfully, for everyone's sake, I'm not.

Last Business Trip to New York

Acela Express 2159, departing Boston at 9:15 for Washington, D.C.: I'm on what is almost certainly my last business trip. We've just passed Providence. I've got the Glee version of "Like a Prayer" blasting through my headphones (to block out the shouted conversation of the businesswoman-in-jean-shorts across the aisle).

End of an era.

I'm heading down to our New York for a two-day training that GSMCF is putting on for those of us who are heading off to grad school this fall. The vast majority of the attendees will be going to business school (the usual suspects of HBS, Kellogg, Wharton, Haas, Tuck, etc.). Two of us (I think) are doing non-business related grad degrees. I'm the only one off to a doctoral program and the only one in the humanities / social sciences.

The training seems to me to be a very smart idea in both directions: for us, we'll get time to reflect on our careers at the firm, learn about how to position our consulting experience, dig into our leadership and communication styles, etc. The firm gets one last chance to make sure that we take off on a high note and with happy thoughts about GSMCF in our heads. I'm not sure what my chances are of ending up back in consulting or at GSMCF specifically; hopefully, if I play my cards right and do well in grad school, not very good. But these are the types of things that the firm does for us that make me think that, if I were to end up back in consulting, it wouldn't be such a bad life after all.

Given that I'm on my last business trip, I suppose some reflections on business travel might be appropriate:

• Buy pull-on shoes to speed through airport security. I have two pairs of pull-on loafers, one in black and one in brown, for maximum flexibility.

• Keep a separate travel toiletry bag. Rather than having to rifle through your toiletries at home to assemble a travel kit for every trip, stock a quart-sized plastic bag (the kind approved for airport security) with travel-sized toothpaste, deodorant, hair product, etc. so that you can grab-and-go in the morning.

• Never fly from Boston to New York. It just doesn't make any sense to me to take a flight that lands in an airport that is a $50 cab ride from downtown when you can -- in roughly the same amount of time -- have a leisurely ride on the train into the heart of the city. You get ample leg room, all the electricity you can use, and pretty views of Connecticut. It's not even close.

• Never check bags. This goes without saying.

• Invest in wrinkle-free shirts and pants. I don't know how I would have looked presentable for the past 4 years without wrinkle-free business clothes. You can virtually stuff them into your carry-on for the flight, hang them up when you get to the hotel, and -- voila! -- the next morning it looks like you've just taken them out of your closet at home (you can hang them up in the bathroom while you take a steamy shower for a quick refresh). Now we just need Brooks Brothers to start making its extra slim fit shirts in non-iron fabric.

That's all I can think of for now. Is it any surprise that Up in the Air has become one of my favorite movies?

Whitman's Disastrous Fall

The latest PPIC polls released today show that Meg Whitman's campaign has taken a delightful tumble since March, cutting her lead over Steve Poizner in the California gubernatorial race from 50 points to 9 points. All this despite spending $68 million of her own money trying to spin away the fact that for 28 years she never once voted in an election in the state that she now hopes to lead. I'm glad the Republicans in California are finally recognizing what a major loser Meg Whitman is. All you needed to do to predict this inevitable drop was to listen to her ducking questions -- quite incompetently, I might add -- about her voting record at last fall's state Republican Party convention. Have you ever seen or heard a more frighteningly inarticulate and cowardly candidate for public office (besides Sarah Palin)?

Marriage Equality in Portugal

I went to the oral surgeon this morning for a connective tissue graft, and was at my desk by 10:30. I'm not sure if that was a good idea or not. We'll see.

You may have heard by now from all of the major news outlets (I'll link to the BBC's article) that gay marriage will soon be legal in Portugal, as President Anibal Cavaco Silva has indicated that he will not veto the marriage equality that passed with the support of the ruling Socialist Party. A couple of things that I think are worthy of note:

• Portugal in their national legislature has managed to assemble veto-proof majorities in favor of progressive social legislation. In the mean time, the House of Representatives can barely scrape together the 5 votes needed to provide health insurance as a basic right for all Americans.

• As part of his explanation for his decision, President Silva noted that ratifying the marriage equality bill would allow the legislature to get back to dealing with the most pressing issues of the day, namely that of managing the struggling economy. This point is the one that I wish someone would make more forcefully in the U.S.: of all the things we have to worry about these days, why spend your time worrying about who is marrying whom and what their genders are? Even if we weren't in a recession, why would you donate thousands of dollars to an anti-gay marriage initiative (as some of my family friends in the SF Bay area did in 2008 for Prop. 8) when you could feed literally thousands of people with the same amount of money if it went to the local food bank instead? I just don't get it.

In any case, as with each jurisdiction that signs onto marriage equality, the inevitability of gay marriage comes into clearer relief. I'm not foolish enough to believe that one day gay marriage will be legal everywhere, but I am optimistic that one day gay marriage will be legal in enough places that GLBT people around the world won't have to make the difficult decision of choosing between where they want to live and the rights and protections they'll have for their families. One day, we'll all look back and wonder what the fuss was about.

In fact, on this point, I got to thinking about all of the opponents of marriage equality like Matthew Holland and Orson Scott Card and Maggie Gallagher (all current or former members of the National Organization for Marriage): would they have supported interracial marriage, or would they have decried Loving v. Virginia when it was handed down through "judicial activism" in 1967? Of course, given the wide acceptance of race as a protected class now, I'm sure that they would all hail the issue as a vastly different one such that they would have been on the frontlines protesting anti-miscegenation laws from the get-go. But I'm not so sure, especially if, like Prop. 8, the Mormon Church had taken a strong position against interracial marriage.

Let me be clear: I'm not suggesting that these people are racist. What I am suggesting is that they follow too willingly and blindly the dictates of an organized religion. And when that organized religion prizes obedience and is also led by people whose worldviews about how society should be organized were shaped generations ago, you get the dangerous result of otherwise reasonable, fairly smart, and young people going along with social policy ideas that should have died out at the end of the Victorian Age. Call it the timelessness of morality if you want, but I think that's how crazy ideas get passed down.

Anyway, good for Portugal, especially since the Pope was just there peddling his bat-shit-craziness. Sucks not to have any credibility as a religious leader, doesn't it, Benedict?

And on a final note, it looks like Glee will be covering Bad Romance! (Everyone who is surprised by this should leave. Now.) You can listen to the full version of the song here (thanks, Morgan!).

The Secret in Their Eyes

We just came back from seeing El Secreto de Sus Ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes) at the Kendall Square theater, and it was such a spectacular movie that I had to blog about it right when I got home. El Secreto de Sus Ojos was the Argentinian submission for the 2010 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film; I haven't seen the others, but from what I can tell there's a very good reason it took home the Oscar. Actually, I'm still a little speechless -- it's really the perfect thriller with just the right touch of romance and humor. "Sperm Bank, loan department."

Instead of reading any kind of half-formed opinion on my part, let me refer you to David Denby's review in the New Yorker.

More than the movie itself, though, it was just the perfect date night after a roller coaster week at work. We strolled to the theater after a dinner of chicken and orzo and an outstanding gazpacho. I've really come to love having the Kendall Square Cinema so closeby for the last 2 years: in addition to El Secreto, I've seen some truly excellent and thought-provoking movies there including Food Inc., Babel, An Education, and The Cove. Pedro did some research into theaters around Morningside Heights, and unfortunately I don't think we're going to have the same kind of luck in terms of a right-down-the-street, first-run art house/indie/foreign films theater near the new apartment.

There are some perks to living in the Republic of Cambridge.

Housing

Pedro and I got our housing assignment from Columbia yesterday! We were assigned to 434 West 120th Street, #2H. Our rent is $1,445 a month (a little under $100 less than what we're paying now for a 1-bedroom in Cambridge), utilities not included. The single move-in date offered is August 13.

I guess we're moving to Morningside Heights!

We are a one-bedroom on the second floor of what looks to be a ten-story building named the Poinciana. I love buildings with proper names -- think the Dakota at 72nd and Central Park West -- that almost seem like they don't need to have an address or cross street when you talk about them in conversation because everyone knows exactly where they are. I'm already getting a mental image of us getting into a cab and telling the driver: "Please take us to the Poinciana." But who am I kidding? We won't be taking cabs in New York on a grad student budget!

Here is a Google Maps satellite image of the building and its environs, with our unit highlighted by the red circle:


Although the building sits at the intersection of W120th and Amsterdam (which, I understand, is a major truck route), our unit is actually set further in and has a view of the "courtyard," which means that we won't get much sun light but that we (hopefully) also won't get much of the truck traffic noise either. The building looks like it's about a 3-minute walk from Fayerweather Hall where the history department is housed, and is around the corner from a number of useful stores like a pharmacy, pizza shop, stationer, and cafe. It's also a block away from Morningside Park, which, when I was living in Morningside Heights in summer of 2003 and working for the Parks Department, I was always told was a dodgy place. Yelp reviewers agree that the park continues to be a questionable hangout after dark, but that during the day it is quite nice. Alas, upon browsing the Parks department website, it's clear that there are no tennis courts. The closest subway station appears to be at W116th and Broadway, where the 1 makes a stop. We'll get to see plenty of Columbia's campus because we'll have to cut through the campus for the most efficient path to the subway.

The Google Maps street-view of the building's front shows what appears to be a doorman/security guard in front. We'll have to make friends with him; I hope he likes chocolate-covered macaroons.


Last but not least, the apartment itself:


We were lucky to have gotten floorplan, although Columbia's housing office didn't send any pictures. The place is probably just a smidgen smaller than our current apartment; the bedroom is narrower but longer. The living room is just about the same size, with a nice nook to the left of the closet that would make for a nice home office for Pedro. The lack of storage is going pose a real challenge (where will we put our giant stockpot or the food processor or the KitchenAid mixer?), as is the kitchenette. I'm not sure why there is a random wall separating the kitchen from the living room, which kind of limits the space and mobility that we'll have in the kitchen. When I was first planning to move to Cambridge in 2006, I had spoken with one of my favorite professors at Amherst (who happens to live in this rambling New England farmhouse with a kitchen the size of a New York deli) about my disappointment in the apartment's rather squalid kitchen. I can still remember her response: "There is a special pride that comes of preparing a good meal in a small kitchen." It looks like I'm going to have a lot of that special pride next year.

We're pretty much locked into this apartment, because Columbia doesn't guarantee housing again if you turn down their initial offer. Now that we have a moving date in mind, we can start to plan the rest of the summer around landing in New York on August 13. I have to give Columbia credit for being as accommodating as they were with our demands (on our application, Pedro and I listed "one-bedroom" as the only option we were willing to work with) and for making the process relatively simple and painless. Although the housing assignment lacked transparency, I can understand that, when one office is in charge of doling out 7,000+ units of housing, you don't really want a back-and-forth with every single tenant.

It's becoming more and more real with each passing day that we're moving to New York and that I'm starting grad school this fall. Getting the housing assignment is one more step in that direction. Hooray!

Times Square Bomb Scare

So I know that terrorism is no laughing matter, but I can't really help but chuckle a little at all of the media coverage surrounding the recent bomb scare in Times Square.

First of all, some of the quotes in the original New York Times article on the incident were downright patronizing, if not taunting. Mayor Bloomberg said that the device "looked amateurish." Piling on, explosives expert Kevin Berry noted that, if the bomb had functioned as intended, "it would be more of an incendiary event" rather than explosion. I'm not sure what an "incendiary event" means (the phrase conjures up images of July 4th fireworks), but Mayor Bloomberg and Mr. Berry almost seem like they're saying to the perp: "You know what? Your plan flopped not just because we're awesome at our jobs, but also because you suck at making bombs." Terrorist fail.

And then there was the reporting in the Times. The original article covering the incident struck a strangely patriotic tone in its closing sentences. A police sergeant from Florida who was in town while chaperoning a school trip was quoted as saying that he was impressed by his New York counterparts; "I just sat back and learned a lot," he added. The Times also found a Brazilian tourist who leaped to a broad sort of sympathy, saying: "I feel sorry for America. I'm at your guys' side." I'm not sure why the Times felt the need to jump straight to this type of "defend-the-Motherland" reaction without having more thoroughly ascertained the other, arguably more relevant details of the bomb scare. The Floridian made the scare seem almost more like a Broadway spectacular rather than the real threat that it was, while the Brazilian went in the opposite and overly dramatic direction. Reporting fail.

And now the NYPD is supposedly looking for a White man in his 40's as the "person of interest" in the case. It's a good reminder that, before 9/11, Timothy McVeigh had been the deadliest terrorist in American history. Can you imagine if we tried to racially profile every White man in his 40's in New York to catch the alleged suspect (in fact, I'd kind of like to see them try)? Police fail. Crazies comes in all shapes and sizes. We're lucky that our modern law enforcement agencies can rely on much more sophisticated methods to identify suspects and to make their case. Except in Arizona.

I know I'm pushing the envelop with this post, and, to be honest, all of this joking masks a certain unease I feel about the episode. What's clear from the whole affair is that a partnership between a vigilant public and a crack law enforcement team helped prevent something that turned out to be merely alarming from becoming something far more serious. I am truly thankful for that. Even from afar, I've always felt a certain protectiveness of New York, and not just because I'm going to be moving there. When I was a senior in high school, I had a chance to visit Ground Zero in February 2002 and to volunteer at the St. Paul's Chapel for an evening. St. Paul's is a small church across the street from World Trade Center, and in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks it was used as a staging area for the emergency workers who continued going down into the rubble to search for survivors, even five months later. I spent 12 hours working an overnight volunteer shift in support of these emergency workers, fetching food, drinks, and blankets for them in between shifts and talking to them about what they saw. At sunrise, I went with one of the chaperones (a photography teacher from a nearby high school) to the family viewing platform on the southwest corner of the site. I started to cry when I saw a half-used box of tissues on one of the chairs. I didn't know anyone who had been directly affected by the attack (at least until I went to college on the East Coast), but staring at the gaping hole in the ground, I felt like I shared a small bit of the pain and a lot of the anger. It sounds weird to say it, because it makes me sound like a raving lunatic a la Dick Cheney or Sarah Palin, but that experience made me feel like I was -- that day and a little bit ever since -- a New Yorker.

It's especially important during these potentially chaotic times to make sure that level-headed discourse prevails in our press and ethically responsible methods in our government. And I reserve the right to laugh a little at the absurdity when they fail to do so.

(Yes, I made that graphic at the top. And yes, I know it's sensationalist. But that's the angry New Yorker in me coming out.)

Priorities

Ashley Parker's article in this week's New York Times Magazine ("All the Obama 20-Somethings") is making me think.

Probably a couple of months ago Pedro and I hosted a friend of ours who was in town from Washington, DC for an untimely funeral. I first met my friend in my freshman year of college when his undergraduate alma mater played mine at Homecoming. Although we usually only saw each other at most once a year, we stayed in touch over the years united by a mutual interest in progressive politics (often with him acting as my mentor in challenging my lingering conservatism). After graduation, while I went into a reasonably safe corporate job in Boston, my friend went abroad to Afghanistan, working to help set up the country's educational system in the aftermath of the Taliban's fall. Upon returning to the States, he took a position in the Obama campaign and became my reliable source for an insider's view on the latest campaign news and gossip. When he last visited Pedro and me in Cambridge, my friend was about to embark on a new position in the West Wing supporting a very high-profile White House official (in the spirit of the Times Magazine article, I'll refrain from revealing either the position or the official). We talked about the work he would do on a day-to-day basis to literally keep our country safe. My friend is 26-years old; we're the same age.

I couldn't help but reflect upon our conversation with my friend in the context of reading Parker's article on the political service and social culture of the "Obama Generation" that is currently in the White House. Particularly striking to me was a quote from Eric Lesser (who is David Axelrod's body-man): "This is the way I can make my small contribution...I’ll be able to look my children in the eye and say, 'When I was in my 20s, I was a small part of something way bigger than myself.'" Having grown up watching the West Wing, where wonky but witty White House junior staffers were lionized as the idealistic force that could strengthen American democracy, public service has always appealed to me as a career. I even did a bit of it myself in college, first working for the Department of Parks & Recreation in New York and then for the California State Assembly. My work never rose to the level of importance of Lesser's in making sure that "Axe" stays on-schedule or of Jon Favreau's in making sure that Obama has the right words at his disposal. But it felt good to know that I was making government work for the people, whether by improving the conditions of New York City's parks or helping a constituent get subsidized housing.

I wish I had Lesser's confidence that I'll be able to look back in 30 years and tell my children that I was part of something much bigger than myself. There is a small part of me that regrets not taking a leave of absence from GSMCF in 2008 to work for the Obama campaign, or to volunteer in the field for the No on 8 campaign. The morning after the passage of Prop. 8, I woke up with a sinking feeling: What if I had done more than just donate money from Massachusetts? Why didn't I get on a plane and fight for what I really believe in? What do I want to be my legacy?

I suppose these kinds of doubts are inevitable as I'm beginning to think about wrapping up my 4 years in consulting. And I am indeed proud of (some of) the work I've done at GSMCF and the little impact I've had on the projects that have come across my desk. My friend and I both took risks, but on a different scale and in different directions. And as I'm now looking to start a career in academia, there are moments when I'm frightened by the potential irrelevance of sitting in an Ivory Tower for the rest of my life.

For better or for worse, I'm the only person who can control that aspect of my fate, and historians certainly don't have to be irrelevant to public life. Nancy Cott, who is Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard, helped set the record straight at the recent Prop. 8 trial as an expert witness on the changing nature and definition of "family." Eric Foner, who is Dewitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia, has spoken and written widely on the controversy surrounding the curriculum revisions by the Texas State Board of Education. All of the Asian American historians with whom I met during my school visits urged me to become not just an historian but, more importantly, a scholar-activist who is actively involved in the communities that matter to me.

Marriage equality. Immigration reform. It may be too late to jump on the Obama bandwagon, but there's still plenty to do.

Not Your Typical Tuesday Night

Pedro and I did something very un-grad-student-like last night. We went to a charity fundraiser...and won something.

I should start by saying that I don't really do charity fundraisers. I associate them with Botoxed socialites in sequined dresses who stand around with martinis having pictures taken by roaming photographers. I'm never sure where the value is, or why the Globe or the Improper Bostonian would publish those photos. That "scene" just never really made sense to me and was never something I aspired to.

So it was with some ambivalence last night that I went to ClimActs...Under a Big Top!, the annual fundraiser for the Theater Offensive. The Theater Offensive, under the direction of the ever-fabulous Abe Ryebeck, is an organization that I first got to know when Pedro's consulting firm worked with them as part of a social entrepreneurship investment initiative. The Theater Offensive's mission is "[to] form and present the diverse realities of queer lives in art so bold it breaks through personal isolation and political orthodoxy to help build an honest, progressive community." Their program with which I most identify is True Colors: Out Youth Theater, which involves GLBTQQA youth ages 14-22 in honest portrayals of and productive conversations about their lives through theater. Especially having seen The Mormon Proposition last night at the Indie Film Festival, it was wonderful to watch four young actors in the center of the ring stand tall and proclaim their pride.

ClimActs was held at the Big Apple Circus tent on City Hall Plaza. I knew it was my kind of party not so much when I saw the open bar as when I saw that the passed "hors d'oeuvres" were cotton candy, mini fried doughnuts, and gingerbread cookies. The main portion of the event involved the presentation of an award to Alan Cumming (accepted in absentia by Christian Siriano of Project Runway / Bravo fame), a couple of acrobatic acts, and a live auction of some pretty ridiculous -- and sometimes puzzling -- prizes (what is a "gay-friendly African safari"?). Christian Siriano really does look as young and tiny as he does on TV; disappointingly, there were no utterances that we could hear of "fierce," "hot tranny mess," or (as I've been informed about his latest phrase-du-jeur) "it's a moment."

I had seen the auction listing before coming to the event, and I knew that there was an item donated personally by Neil Patrick Harris that I might be interested in bidding on. Pedro had introduced me a couple of years ago to the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother (the show's creator, writer, and executive producer Carter Bays is a graduate of Wesleyan where Pedro also went). NPH had donated to the Theater Offensive a prize for a walk-on role on the show along with a tour of the set and a meet-and-greet with the cast. The auctioneer started bidding at $500, and the price quickly rocketed up, and then slowed down around $2,000. The auctioneer was focusing on a couple that sat near the center section of the tent. "$2,200," he called. "Do I have $2,300? Going once...going twice..." And then, for whatever reason, I raised my bid card and called out my bid. The drag queen from Jacque's Cabaret who was spotting the auction in my section started waving her little red pom-pom frantically at the auctioneer, but he couldn't hear her above the din. "Sold!" He yelled to the other bidder, and started to take down their number. Our dear drag queen friend, bless her heart, kept yelling until she caught his attention, and he turned toward me with an apologetic look. "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't hear you." I shrugged, figuring that I'd lost my chance (and, really, I'd be just fine keeping the money for grad school). He walked back over to the center section of the tent to the other bidders; I couldn't see him very well, but I could hear him ask them on the mic: "Will you let him have it?" They said yes.

And, just like that, Pedro and I won ourselves a walk-on role on How I Met Your Mother...!!!

I have zero buyer's remorse. It's only money, and it's for a good cause. It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do something completely crazy. It's a reason to go to California. I'm not sure yet which episode we'll get to participate in or when the taping will happen or when it will air, and the prize is contingent on CBS picking up a sixth season of the show. Pedro and I were talking about what a walk-on role might entail: on the show, the characters like to gather in this one bar near their apartment to hash out their existential questions, and I'm betting that the role will involve sitting at a table in that bar as an extra during one of those scenes.

Also, I ran into an old acquaintance at the fundraiser who is just now finishing his PhD in economics at MIT. He told me that he would be moving out to LA this fall because he had landed a job at one of the top liberal arts colleges on the West Coast (which our dear President Obama may or may not have attended before transferring to Columbia). This is heartening news -- although I'm nowhere near as smart as my acquaintance, and economics is arguably more "marketable" than history. Nevertheless, it's great to hear that one's friends in academia are landing in good jobs in desirable cities around the country.

Who knows? If I can't find a tenure-track job, maybe I'll call up NPH and give Hollywood a shot.

Pre-Screening "8: The Mormon Proposition"

Tonight's we're going with friends to see "8: The Mormon Proposition" at the Boston Indie Film Festival at the delightful Somerville Theater in Davis Square (those of you who are unfamiliar should go if only for the Museum of Bad Art in the basement). According to the IFF, "Reed Cowan’s and Steven Greenstreet’s documentary scrutinizes and intrepidly confronts the Mormon Church’s involvement in funding the promotion of California’s Proposition 8, a bill that revoked same-sex couples’ right to marry and the benefits afforded legally in tandem with that union."

As you may have guessed if you've read the first post to this blog, Prop. 8 was an incredibly painful political event. Election Night 2008 really took my head for a spin -- as a person of color, the euphoria of seeing our nation elect the first Black man as president was offset by the pain of realizing that many of my own family and friends in the Mormon Church had donated money and voted to take away my right to marriage equality as a gay man in California. While most of the East Coast went to bed happily after seeing Obama's victory speech, I stayed up late first sitting in front of the TV and then later in bed with my laptop, obsessively pressing the "refresh" button on 2 different newspaper websites and the California Secretary of State's election results portal. I woke up in despair and with a sense of rage that has still to subside completely, if ever. It felt strangely personal, even though I had long since moved away from California, because -- as I told my brother one month before the election in a last-ditch attempt to sway his vote -- it was the only time then and since when my rights as an individual were being subjected to a referendum by millions of voters who didn't know me or know my life. I made a vow after Prop. 8 never again to step foot inside a Mormon building because of the heinous ignorance and bigotry that was applied in the Church's support of Proposition 8 and its attacks on GLBT families everywhere. Even if it means missing a family member's wedding or graduation or baptism.

I have to admit that, while I'm very interested in what "8" has to say about the Church's involvement in Prop. 8, I'm also afraid to see it. In some ways, I'm afraid that the movie won't be effective by focusing too much on the human-interest impact of Prop. 8 rather than confronting and exposing the discriminatory and flawed logic behind the Church's efforts. I'm afraid that the movie actually gives the Church a platform to broadcast its sugar-coated hate to a wider audience. Most of all, I'm afraid that the movie will be hard to watch just because it hurts too much to remember back to November 2008. I almost feel like a documentary on this very topic might reopen wounds without speaking to the audience -- Dick and Jane Mormon and their numerous children -- that needs to hear this message the most.

The Mormon Church may be stupid, but most Mormons as individuals aren't. I've observed this first-hand in my conversations with Mormons both before and after the passage of Prop. 8. There were lots of Church members who felt that Prop. 8 was wrong, and some even had the gumption to speak up about it publicly (a la Steve Young's wife). But so far we haven't heard their stories of courage. How did they come to believe in marriage equality? Was it a conversation with their best friend or coworker or sibling? How did they speak up in their own little way against injustice? What consequences did they feel and experience from the Church's official apparatus? The Mormon Church is too big to fail; to really make change, I firmly believe activists will have to work from within to build coalitions around those basic human emotions of love and a desire for fairness that we all share regardless of our faith. I have to believe that somewhere out there, there are Mormons who would be willing to look into a camera and confess their conviction that, when Jesus preached "thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," he wasn't just talking about straight people.

Now that's a documentary I would pay to see.

Hiring the Liberal Arts

In today's Wall Street Journal "Hire Education" blog, Dean Allyson Moore of Amherst College's Career Center argues in a post entitled "History Majors Despairing? Hardly" that the value of a liberal arts education continues to be proven in the job market despite the potential appeal of a more marketable degree (especially in this recession). Dean Moore cites as evidence for her conclusion recent successes of students with psychology, English, and history backgrounds in securing jobs with such preeminent employers as Bank of American Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Children's Hospital Boston, the Pittsburgh Pirates, and an unnamed consulting firm.

As a graduate of Amherst who current works in business, I can certainly appreciate the value that my educational background has provided. I can still remember my first interview with GSMCF, which was for the firm's summer internship. My interviewer was a 2003 graduate of the College who was in either her first or second year of working for GSMCF. The first-round interview for GSMCF involves a written case in which candidates are asked to assess various quantitative and qualitative questions, and I remember leaving the interview thinking to myself very clearly that I had bombed. Wonderful as my liberal arts education had been, it hadn't prepared me at all to think about how to break down and size the market for the global mining industry. Sure, I'd worked my way through AP Calculus in high school, but this wasn't even calculus; this was a compound multiplication problem at best. The exercise drew on a set of skills that I had set aside long ago, precisely because the open curriculum at Amherst encouraged me to study only that which I was interested in studying, which was history and art history. I did the math in fits and starts -- sweating through all of it -- and had to repeatedly ask my interview for help before I was able to get to anything that remotely approached the right answer. So how did I get through? I'm still not sure to this day, and I'd love to see the evaluation from that conversation to see what my interviewer was thinking when she passed me on for a final round. The only thing I can think of -- and this I do owe to my liberal arts background -- is that perhaps she thought I had shown a level of determination and intellectual curiosity that suggested I might be a good fit for consulting. Accustomed to pursuing knowledge for the sake of pursuing knowledge, I didn't get as flustered or frustrated by my own inability to get the "right answer" as perhaps others might had been trained to find a definitive solution come hell or high water.

Nevertheless, I've also sat in enough interviews on the other side of the table to know that educational background, though important, is but one factor in an employer's decision. To quote, as Dean Moore does, the success of one student who is double-majoring in English and history in landing a job with a prominent investment bank as proof that humanities students aren't despairing about the utility of their academic training is, if nothing else, a rhetorical fail. Who knows why and how Alex Kaufman got his job with Bank of America? It could very well have been because Alex simply excelled in his interview, or it could have been because his mother made a call to someone-who-knows-someone at BofA. Let's face it: at Amherst and other institutions like it, the latter is not entirely outside the realm of possibility, and I've certainly seen it happen at GSMCF.

The key takeaway for me from reading Dean Moore's post and from my own experience is that, in today's job market, there is no single guarantee of success. Academic pedigree and intellectual achievements, pre-professional networking, diversity, and even the color of the suit or dress you choose to wear to your interview can play a role in determining whether you might pass a first-round interview, let alone receive an offer. And those are only factors that you have control over; we're not even talking about everything else that is outside of your control. Back in 2005, one of the women in my internship interview group for GSMCF was 45 minutes late to our final round interview because she decided to take the bus from Amherst to Boston; though she took the earliest Peter Pan bus she could, she didn't anticipate that blizzard-like conditions on the Mass Pike would delay her arrival. For GSMCF's interview format, that was a fatal blow; though she made a remarkable recovery despite her initial disadvantage, she knew on the drive back to Amherst (I drove, and would've driven her in the morning if I'd known she was also interviewing) that she wasn't going to get any further in the process. The reality is that, given the odds, employers can afford to take a chance that an equally -- if not more -- qualified candidate is waiting just around the corner. It's certainly not fair that you might get rejected just because of something as random as your interviewer waking up on the wrong side of the bed that morning, but, hey, that's life.

To Dean Moore's credit, she does say that she "could cite hundreds of students who greatly benefited from their liberal-arts education and later enjoyed incredible success throughout their careers." Let's see those statistics, then. In a job market as competitive as the one faced by college students today, warm-and-fuzzy anecdotes aren't helpful to anyone. So what's a job candidate to do -- especially one with a liberal arts degree? Candidates should round out their skillsets and knowledge and practice articulating their relevance to employers, rather than relying on the simple fact that they've got such-and-such a background (liberal arts, marketing, or otherwise). I can only speak from the perspective of someone who has been involved with recruiting for a consulting firm, but here are some general tips from the inside:

• Do your homework / Over-invest in a few opportunities that are the best fit for you: I see reams of resume each fall and spring where candidates have clearly applied a shot-gun approach to their job search, and who can blame them? That said, it is generally advisable to do some due diligence on the organizations to which you are applying and to demonstrate that you've put in this effort in your application. The decision to hire someone is ultimately a decision to make a significant human asset investment, and employers want to see that you've made a similar investment in learning about them through your search. You should be able to articulate in your cover letter what you think the employer is looking for and why you would be a good fit. And, for the love of God, please proof-read your application before you send it.
  
• Connect with alumni: Especially if you go to a small-ish school like Amherst, there is absolutely no reason to apply in the blind. Use your institution's alumni directory to find people who will be able to not only give you a sense of whether the employer is the right fit, but, more importantly, who will be able to guide you through the interview process and serve as your advocate within the organization. This works even better if you have ties to a semi-exclusive group with strong links to its alumni, like a fraternity, sports team, or an a cappella group.
  
• Ask for feedback: For employers with multi-round interviews (whether by phone or in-person), always take a couple of minutes to ask your interviewer for feedback, especially if you are advancing from one round to the next. What will the next interview look like? Based on your performance in the initial round, what could you do better to prepare yourself or position yourself for success? Even if you are rejected, don't just hang up -- the feedback could help you land your next job.
  

While all job searches are competitive, another solution is to look at the "supply side" of the equation by expanding the range of opportunities that students consider. In her post, Dean Moore cites two investment banks and a consulting firm out of five possible employers. For a place like Amherst, i-banks and consulting firms understandably feel like the summit of Job Search Mountain by virtue of how high-profile, lucrative, and competitive they are. But they're not right for every student, and career centers need to do a better job of outlining potential career options outside of the usual suspects in the private sector. I'm proud that Amherst now routinely sends a large crop of its graduates each year to teaching programs like Teach for America and the Mississippi Teachers Corps (although, to be frank, those programs are equally if not more selective than i-banks and consulting firms). The point is that there are a lot of other things that students could be considering that they probably don't because talk about i-banks and consulting firms dominate the airwaves. In a new economy where my generation is much less likely than our parents to make a lifelong career out of our first job out of college, the notion of the first job as a be-all-end-all needs to be tweaked to encourage healthy exploration and experimentation. Whether working in a lab or on Capitol Hill or for an urban nonprofit or at a tech start-up, there are valuable skills and perspectives to be gained. And if one should decide after 3 or 4 years that one still desires a career in investment banking or consulting, then he or she will have an even richer trove of experiences to draw upon as a candidate.

I got lucky when I first applied to GSMCF 5 years ago (hard to believe it's been half a decade since my internship), but I'm not sure that I would get lucky if I had to do it all over again today. To support students like me who come from the liberal arts, I hope that Dean Moore and other career advisors like her have more effective solutions to offer than just an Albert Einstein quote.

Date Night

Pedro and I went on a date tonight to see (coincidentally) Date Night, the new comedy with Steve Carell and Tina Fey.

Date Night united the stars of two of my favorite TV shows -- The Office and 30 Rock; the highlight of the movie, as you can probably imagine, is less around the actual plot then watching Steve Carell and Tina Fey bounce off each other (although a shirtless and very worked-out Mark Wahlberg certainly doesn't hurt). Not surprisingly given the cast, the movie at points approached grimace-inducing slap-stick. A strip-club scene involving Fey in a frilly bustier and Carell as her androgynous sidekick was particularly disappointing: Tina Fey writes arguably some of the smartest comedy on TV today, and it was sad to see her take part in the stock caricature of the scantily-clad pole dancer to land a couple of easy laughs. One could imagine, for example, a more interesting spin with Fey playing the role of a female pimp to Carell as a pole dancer.

The biggest issue with Date Night -- if one really wants to look at it critically -- is that the plot seems to undermine its very moral. Steve Carell and Tina Fey play Phil and Claire Foster, a suburban couple from New Jersey that is the epitome of marital stability bordering on boredom-induced-failure. What's clear from the exposition is that Phil and Claire care a tremendous amount for each other; they're still at the point where they will offer to do things for each other such as making lunch for the children and attending an insufferable book club. One gets the sense that what's really getting between them isn't so much waning affection or wandering eyes as the general wear-and-tear of daily life. Phil and Claire try to stave off romantic staleness by going on a weekly date night, and it is on such a night that they get caught up in a web of political blackmail, car chases, and shirtless former Calvin-Klein-models. Naturally, all of the explosions and gunfire bring out the best in Phil and Claire, and their passions are reignited by the realization of how far they would go for each other when they are driving backwards down Lexington Avenue in a souped-up Audi that belongs to Marky Mark.

It's a fun and romantic notion, but one that perhaps doesn't quite get to the heart of the issue in Phil and Claire's marriage. Grandiose gestures are easy: when someone is pointing a gun at the mother of your children, I would imagine that it's really not that hard to figure out that the right thing to do at that moment is to step between her and the goon with the semiautomatic. What's harder is deciding, when your partner is taking out the trash, to put a fresh garbage bag in the bin so that he doesn't have to do it when he comes back into the house. Or doing the dishes even though you've cooked dinner because she happens to have work to do that night. It's doing the selfless thing when the stakes are low and the payout will be minimal and/or delayed. They could've made a movie where Steve Carell happily volunteers to make not only breakfast but also lunch in the morning, to close all the open drawers in the bathroom, to pick up and drop off the kids from soccer practice; and repeats this day after day for 18 years. But how would Hollywood sell movie tickets if they couldn't deal out unrealistic expectations about love and romance?

I also saw Clash of the Titans on Friday. For $16. Oh, how Liam Neeson has fallen. And that's all I'll say about that.

File Under "Progress?"

Dvice offers news of a new Young Explorer workstation by Little Tikes, a $2,600-cubicle-with-built-in-computer to give your Baby Mozart a head start in becoming the next Peter Gibbons. Fax machine sold separately.

As a white-collar professional who sits in front of a computer for at least 8 hours a day, I heartily applaud this product. Police, firemen, and even bakers are routinely idolized through children's toys. Isn't it time that office drones also get some recognition for the work their glamorous work environments? All the better if you have more than one child: then they can even learn how to reserve shared office space like so many other companies (including my own firm) that have started a hotelling system to save on physical plant costs.

If there's one thing I would change, though, it would be the desktop concept. Kids need to start dealing with the fact that, in our digital economy, 9-to-5 jobs where you leave your computer at work will soon be a thing of the past. Next up for Little Tikes: a laptop with extended-life battery so kids can learn to check their email at 10 PM!

Recipe for Raging Grilled Chicken

Watching the first episode of Top Chef Masters just now put me in a foodie mood. It's nice to see openly queer people on the show this season -- Susan Feniger of Border Grill/Ciudad/Street and Jerry Traunfeld of Poppy in Seattle. In fact, Jerry is playing for the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. Don't you just love Bravo?

Last night Pedro and I hosted a friend for a casual grilled dinner to start off the week. The menu was relatively easy to prepare and unified by Asian ingredients and flavors: soy, miso (brushed onto grilled eggplant), sriracha hot sauce. I played around with a butter glaze for grilled chicken breasts that had first been brined, and it worked out nicely. Here's the recipe for what I'm calling "Raging Grilled Chicken."

- 2 chicken breasts (about ~1 lb.), scored lightly in a cross-hatch pattern
- Ground black pepper

Brine:
- Half lemon, cut into 4 pieces
- 2 cloves garlic
- 1/2 cup salt
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 2 cups hot water (microwaved is fine)
- 1 quart cold water

Butter glaze:
- 3 Tbs butter, melted
- 1 tsp lemon juice
- 1 tsp minced ginger
- Dash of sriracha hot sauce to taste

Dissolve the salt and sugar in the hot water, and mix in with the cold water, garlic, and lemon. Making sure that the brine is chilled (refrigerate it for a few minutes to get it down to temperature), slip in the chicken breasts and let sit for at least one hour (per pound). Pedro and I used the time to take a run along the Charles.

Take the chicken breasts out after brining, and sprinkle with black pepper. Build a hot fire, and brush one side of the chicken breasts with the butter glaze. Put the chicken glazed side down on the grill and cook for 3 minutes. Apply the glaze on the top side of the breast, and flip to cook for 3 minutes. Apply glaze and cook for 3 more minutes again on each side until the chicken reaches an internal temperature of at least 160 degrees. Remove the chicken from the grill and cover with foil for 10 minutes before slicing for serving.

Serve with grilled vegetables and steamed rice. We finished the meal with banana-Thin-Mints-nutella-sundaes with our friends' homemade chocolate sauce. But that's another recipe for another day.

Hello, World!

Welcome to my blog!

This is the story of a yuppie who trades in his expense-account dinners for ramen and boxed mac-and-cheese.

...Of moving to the Big Apple from Boston and becoming a New Yorker on a grad-student budget.

...Of frustrations in dealing with a vast university bureaucracy.

...Of maneuvering around young romance and the challenges of sharing a New York-sized apartment with someone you love (most of the time).

...Of anxiety about a career path where you train for 6 (or 7 or 8 or 9) years to have almost no control over your job prospects or placement.

Above all, this is the story of someone who gives up the corporate career for a life spent in the pursuit of knowledge, and whether that all ends happily ever after...or not.

I had sold out; now I'm Selling Back In.

A little bit about my background: I've worked for the past 3.5 years at a global strategy and management consulting firm that is routinely ranked by Vault.com among the best in the industry. My positions at GSMCF have ranged from project analyst and junior manager to U.S. head of undergraduate recruiting to North American staffing manager. I'd like to think based on my private sector experience that I've got a pretty well-rounded view of business, both in terms of advising clients on how to run theirs but also, in my recruiting and Human Assets roles, helping to make the kind of decisions that keep a business going. I did my undergrad at Amherst College, a small liberal arts institution in western Massachusetts, graduating in 2006. (Just a heads-up: I adore my alma mater and will defend Amherst to the death despite its various shortcomings as an elite institution that remains largely insulated from some of the greatest socio-economic challenges of our country, despite the gallant efforts of our president, Tony Marx.) This fall, I'll fulfill a lifelong dream by starting a doctoral program in history at Columbia University in New York, where I hope to study modern U.S. social and cultural history (much more on that later).

As any good historian would probably say, without knowing my background you would have a hard time teasing out my biases, so let me lay it all out there for you:

• First-generation Chinese American: I was born in Hong Kong and came to the United States with my mother and brother in 1993 (when I was 9). I've often pondered what being Chinese American means to me, and I think there are two main manifestations of my culture in my daily life: 1) a tendency to defer to seniority or authority (or both), which has been a challenge in consulting and will also be, I presume, in grad school; and 2) a probably unhealthy amount of concern for and attachment to my mother. I've somehow managed to escape developing any real discernible fresh-off-the-boat accent -- not that there's anything wrong with accents -- but instead sound like something of a cross between an Indianan and a Californian in person.
• Gay: I'm a dude who likes other dudes. This is a non-issue for me at this point, although it seems to bug people in the Midwest for some reason.
• Post-Mormon: My family converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ( as the Church likes to be called) in 1995. I was the one who spearheaded my family's conversion (oh, the foibles of youth), and, coincidentally, was also then the first one to get out when I got to college for reasons that were largely personal and intellectual in nature. For those of you who are not familiar with this particular faith, Mormonism is not merely a membership organization or even just a religion; it's a deeply ingrained culture andlifestyle. Once you drink the Kool-Aid, there can be life after Mormonism, but never really life without it. That's why, while many people who've left the Church choose to use the phrase "ex-Mormon" to describe their affiliation with it, I believe that "post-Mormon" is more apt.
• Tall: I'm abnormally tall for an Asian. Not sure how that affects my thinking or perspective, except that maybe I take a *higher level* view of things. Yes -- you can expect many more bad puns.
• Carnivore: I'm a foodie who believes that food -- especially beef, fish, or shellfish -- is best eaten raw. This is only relevant insofar as restaurant / food reviews may pop up every now and the.
• Democrat: My college friends still like to make fun of the fact that, when I first arrived at Amherst and as late as my sophomore year, I was registered as a Republican. I switched in the summer after my sophomore year after I took my head out of my ass. I think taxes are the price we pay to live in a civilized society. I think expenditures for education and healthcare should outweigh expenditures for "homeland security" and prisons. I support the role of the courts to protect minority rights against majority-rule tyranny. I'm pro-marriage equality and pro-choice, but if I had a baby I probably wouldn't get an abortion (good thing I don't have to worry about that; see "gay"). At the very core of my political philosophy is the notion that government exists to support the least among us.

True to my consulting background, here are the key questions I hope to explore with this blog:

• What will the transition from consulting to academic grad school be like?
• What are my assumptions about grad school, and to what extent will grad school live up to my expectations of being a potentially idyllic, intellectually exciting, and fulfilling life?
• How can one not only survive but even experience one of the most expensive cities in the world as a grad student? (I know lots of other people do, but how do I?)
• Will my passion for history and academia hold up, or will I burn out and/or succumb to the siren call of the private sector?

I'll post stories. I'll post videos. I'll post news articles (including some that may require a subscriber password that I may or may not possess illegally, so apologies for that in advance). And I hope you'll comment so that I know I'm not alone in thinking about all of these questions and issues.

Wish me luck!