A Good Question worth 700 words

The other night a friend asked me if I had a list of things I wanted to do (before I die). Don’t we all? Well, we should!

To me, having a list like that is about dreaming, hoping, and continually working to better ourselves and how we live our lives. At least, that’s what I hope my list says about me…

What’s on your list? What does is say about you?

In any case, these are some of the things I came up with (in no particular order):

* Drive across the US (okay, so I’ve done this once before, but this time I want to stop more along the way)
* Visit the Grand Canyon
* Extend my knowledge of French and American Sign Language, and learn at least one more language (Spanish, for starters)
* Hang glide (and better yet if I could make this happen at Fort Funston, one of my favorite places in the SF bay area)
* Finish my dissertation so that I can name the people who’ve touched my life in my acknowledgements page, and offer them tangible evidence of the fruit of their labors, cares, and concerns all these years
* Go on a cruise (Alaska, British Isles, Danube, Mediterranean)
* Learn everything I can from my parents while I still can, especially about our family histories and Filipino cultures
* Get healthy, stay healthy
* Vacation in Paris, France (pour utiliser le francais j’ai appris dans la universite)
* Get in touch with friends I’ve lost contact with over the years, and stay in touch with them
* Skydive
* Write a book (aside from the academic publishing I hope to do, I want to try my hand at fiction, or perhaps memoir)
* Find a way to have a relationship with my brothers and their families that will last
* Change people’s lives for the better (hopefully I’ve already done a little of this in my teaching)
* Continue to support and participate in changing our world for the better (including, but not limited to ending all oppressions everywhere)

Surprisingly, as I shared this list (well, a version of it anyway) with my friend the other night, the one item that I felt most poignantly about was finding a way to have a relationship with my brothers and their families. Practically all my interactions with them now are mediated by my parents in one way or another, and I worry that once my parents are gone, so too will my way to relate to the rest of my blood family.

We’ve never really been close, but I don’t think that means we can’t learn to be. I wonder what they make of me…(forever) the youngest (the baby of the family), still in school, single, no immediate prospects of a family of my own…

Oh, and queer

I’ve always felt that it was my queerness that’s kept me from being closer to my brothers and their families…

Well, to some extent that’s true since the one brother who told me it was a phase that I’d grow out of when I came out to him, I’ve disliked ever since (okay, he was never my favorite brother to begin with, but this just sealed the deal!)

In other ways, though, I wonder if I’ve just let internalized homophobia get the better of me all these years…

If I really felt okay as my queer self, maybe I would have explicitly acknowledged and asked for the recognition of the respective partners that I brought “home” to visit as partners and not friends (with the implication that we were more than “just” friends).

Maybe I would be more open about talking about exactly what it is I’ve spent all these years in school studying, teaching, and what my dissertation is about instead of just being evasive when the conversation heads this way.

Maybe I would have shared with my mom just how happy I was sharing my life with respective partners, and conversely how I struggled when those relationships ended.

Maybe I wouldn’t be so scared to share so much that’s important to me in my life.

Maybe there is still time to make things different…