thanking in prose

At both of the dining tables to which I was privileged to have been invited this past Thanksgiving, toward the beginning of the meals, the usual suggestion was made of sharing for what each one of us was most thankful. Naturally, there was a collective grumble from the more pragmatic dinner guests. I too shrank away from participating in this activity, though not because I am resistant against such opportunities that serve as un-trafficked avenues for maudlin confessions that inevitably devolve into primetime-TV-esque saccharinities of friendship and love—quite the contrary, I welcome and enable them—but at the moment, I could only think about my recent job loss and, in turn, the confrontation with reality that is my failed adulthood. This hardly put me in the mood to entertain such holidayisms, so I diffused the activity at each dinner with my prudence and humor. I’m resolved to keep that act of diffusion vague to get into the meat, the reason for this blog post.


It wasn’t until later, a day later perhaps, that I realized that I was thankful for many things. My mother of course is one of them. What that poor woman has to put up with with me I can never gesture toward understanding. My friends and the network of support I’ve managed to fashion myself here in the Bay Area, however inconsistent the support seems to be. I am thankful for it. I am thankful that I attended Berkeley as it gets proven to me daily that the quality of my education there has put me ahead of a large percentage of the waking world, and that it is an asset that feels like a curse but is mostly an asset. I am thankful that I lost 30 pounds and managed to keep it off. I am thankful for modern medicine; more specifically, I am thankful for Propecia. I am even thankful that I am gay and that I am Asian and that I am brown. If I weren’t I don’t think I’d be as strong as a person, as eloquent, as educated, as fashionable, as tasteful, as cultured, or as special of a person. And I am thankful that there are enough politically driven people out there to fight for my rights so that I can focus on art, which brings me to a new thing this year, for which I am thankful, because I’m always thankful for these aforementioned things.


I am thankful to have poetry in my life. I am happy, and couldn’t be happier (the accuracy of this bromide deems it unavoidable), that I have decided to subscribe to a life of reading and writing poetry. I feel lucky to have fallen down the rabbit hole of this art form that most individuals only experience partially through the miscellany of audio and visual culture, or overtly and obsequiously at weddings and funerals, and that I get to—because I allow myself to—take it in in all of its awesome distillations. Even now, I am thinking in poetry.

star trek and anal sex: jj abrams' take on the black hole

As you may have noticed, it is finals season for those still in school. Soon, I will reenter their company, but until then, I'll continue to stew in my envy. Though I probably hated and cursed writing papers and doing all-nighters—the memory is far too distant for me to muster a pure recollection—what I distinctly remember is the sense of relief and accomplishment when I completed an essay, usually just in the knick of time. This rush of nostalgia and jealousy, along with a debilitating fear of how much my grey matter has atrophied since graduating in 2006, has motivated me to [half-heartedly] attempt to write an essay in my free time. this is what I have so far:

Star Trek and Anal Sex: JJ Abrams’ Take on the Black Hole

Homosociality, or—in these days—“bromance,” goes into warp-speed in the recently re-imagined story, JJ Abrams’ Star Trek, a prequel of the original Starship Enterprise. In this version, it is difficult to tell whether it is a common tale of male-male camaraderie saturated with blatant pulp and understated subtext of homosexual iconography, or a pornographic, sexually charged homoerotic intergalactic Brokeback Mountain thinly veiled as a run-of-the-mill origin story. Frankly, I think the point is that there isn’t a difference, nor would it matter if one existed. This buddy movie, like all buddy movies, like all queer psychoanalytic theorists have come to know, posits the male buddy characters in an unrealized sexual romance that is continually skirted around, cited and transferred throughout the film. JJ Abrams, in this—time will eventually tell—2009 masterpiece, takes a quantum leap forward with this notion, going where no man (or film) has gone before.

The protagonist of the film, Jim, or James Tiberius Kirk, is introduced as a troubled child lacking discipline because of an absent (read: dead) father. In his first scene, he has hijacked what appears to be his stepfather’s convertible, blasting the Beastie Boys’ hit, Sabotage, whizzing through the landscape of the seemingly endless cornfields of Iowa. Though Abrams may not be prescient enough to predict that Iowa would be the first in a string of states to legalize gay marriage since California’s Proposition 8 debacle, this scene creates a relevant and elucidatory backdrop for my queer reading. On his joyride, Jim drives past a boy, taller than he but we are to assume that they are classmates or neighbors in close age range, taunting him […]

It’s rough, I know. Like my poetry, there’s much to flush out and inject. Since I rarely make outlines, I often use the space of the introduction to parse out my preliminary thoughts. I intend to navigate the reader through a series of portraits and interactions the film presents with interpellation and temporal intercourse at the crux of it all. I will employ the term "interpellation" as both, simply, the act of naming, and in its Althusserian mode, the hailing an individual into a station. It’s exciting to try to regenerate that portion of the brain I’ve neglected for so long. If anyone out there reads this, I need the encouragement!