Being polished is not enough.
[No. 70]
HOW DO YOU RESIST SOCIETAL EXPECTATIONS AROUND RELATIONSHIPS AND LOVE?
A guest post by poet & creator Lee Blankenship
It’s 7:30 pm, and I am sitting in Du-par’s Diner, hungry for a job, waiting to meet someone for a work coffee. I look out the window—it’s raining tonight. I overhear three women in the booth behind me, and I don’t have to see them to know they’ve been crystallized in Life’s comforts. As they laugh over one son’s new girlfriend—her coke addiction being the punchline—I look in the pastry window at one of the stiffening pie slices and imagine it sitting for so long that the filling seeps out an acrid syrup. I imagine what it’s like for sweet things to spoil.
This is surely the oddest scene I’ve sat in for a meeting, which is probably why I feel comfortable. I’m usually lost in the hub of Rodeo Drive, trying to find the same coffee shop crowded with CAA assistants who answer emails out front and vape while anxiously waiting for their bosses’ orders. Or, I am risking a parking ticket on Hollywood Boulevard, rather than paying for parking and a latte [Networking is expensive]. Always, meeting people on their lunch break. I am unemployed and queer so I have little sense of time, but I try to be extra vigilant to not take up much. I ask my few interview questions and study how everyone has tactfully practiced a professional charm that I envy. This is a code-switching I haven’t witnessed enough to possess, but I’ve learned that their coolness—being slightly overworked and steely—measures how competent they are in this business. When it’s time to leave, I text a thank you note that I hope comes off as sincere and not like a message on LinkedIn. Then, I beat myself up, wondering how these pulse-less interactions could ever be enough to foster meaningful relationships.
Art by Steel Transplants
Just then, Veronica hurries into the booth. Her hair is frizzy, even after she settles. She’s late, and I like how this bothers neither of us. Far from a clichéd, buttoned-up Hollywood mixer, Veronica and I met at a bar one Sunday night hosted for trans cuties. Feebly, I straighten up to order pancakes and prepare to give my usual script. But before our food arrives [For her, a sandwich and Lucky Charms milkshake], the meeting already feels different.
I would routinely feel panic at this point to prove how fine I am and list all the Criterion movies I’ve been studying with my exuberant free time. But I didn’t feel this way just then. Somehow, Veronica cleared the air not to excuse composure in the meeting, but so I could—professionally—air my fatigue. We found our own creative way to facilitate a different conversation.
How can exhaling hardships encourage casual closeness, and levity even? Can we model our business affairs after a trans care ethic? Gender Studies professor Hil Malatino answers that we must “think through what so-called bad feelings make possible, open up, shut down, disclose, and foreclose.” For trans people, communal cynicism can alleviate alienation. This is a very trans way of living. As it extends to everyone, so-called private unrest could function as a vehicle to dialogue, and ultimately revolution.
With Veronica I could, in what felt like a very T4T way, refuse a happy affect. This approach didn’t make the meeting unpolished. It illuminated how being polished is not enough. I didn’t flatten myself to feign being fine and defying this boundary is how we delicately created a soft hue of intimacy in the diner. Maybe this was a special incident, and maybe it doesn’t have to be.