Just as I was firing up the old blog, I heard voices inside. Graham came home to sleep last night, after he and his housemates moved from last year's rental to this year's one, which is about a half a mile closer in to campus from last year's as the crow flies. It's actually quite close to where David Hall and I lived in 1989-90, when Marvin actually took up residence on the enclosed sun porch for a little while. That was fun.
In thinking about yesterday's theme of altering one's look for pragmatic reasons, having one's ego/presentation blunted as it were by the demands of others, it occurred to me that part of such pragmatic thinking and practice is that it is a component of thinking quite of quite specific others: one's family. Which is to say spouse and children. I wore a suit and tie for years to maximize my ability to earn money and I still kind of do. If I go to a wedding, funeral, church service, fundraiser, meeting with a prospect or client, whatever it is, I actively dial back ego and fall into compliance with broader norms, and partially it's to optimize my chances of getting revenue somewhere down the line or perhaps of calling up and asking someone if they might do an informational interview with one child or another. I've been doing a lot of that recently for Graham.
And in some sense even in our adolescence we were doing that when seeking out mates. Again, we were in training. Marxists would say that we were "reproducing the social means of production," or something like that. And they would not be wrong.
When I was at Yale it was the second or third inning of broad social acceptance of gay people and lots of people were out or experimenting with same-sex relationships. Straight people were sometimes referred to as breeders. I began to semi-ironically refer to myself as a "breeder" when talking to gay people. It was a good line.
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