Fall 2012 Schedule Adjustments
Get the PDF of these pages.
I scribbled some notes about my course schedule for fall, trying to sort everything out and get myself to commit to a schedule. After reviewing program requirements, my commitments to faculty, course descriptions and other factors I have reduced my course schedule to four courses (12 hours) that seem reasonable to me.
The current working schedule is as follows:
I was simply checking my grades today and reviewed my academic transcript and found that my primary program had changed since my last visit. My primary major was listed as “sociology”. I opened up the status of my application to reveal “decision made”. It seems as though I am now a Master of Arts in Sociology student.
All of my papers have been turned in and graded. As such, I have now released my papers publicly for reading.
Also, my new papers website is now up and running. My new paper site is at: http://papers.cmkularski.net.
You may retrieve this semester’s papers by using the address: http://papers.cmkularski.net/search.php?onProperty=Semester&value=Spring 2012
Or you may click on individual papers listed below:
It is late. This may be terse.
Why must gay guys engage in penetrative intercourse? Why does penetrative intercourse define what is gay? What does it bring to a relationship? To me it seems as though it is an attempt to appropriate heterosexual standards for relationships and sexuality. Is there not more to intimacy than penetrating your partner? Is there no other way to express passion? I have never looked at things this way, but in doing research for my queer theory paper I began thinking about the structure and gay identities portrayed in Latter Days. The scene where Christian and Aaron are happiest is immediately after they have had their first sexual encounter.
To me the act of penetrating one’s partner seems primitive and quite unnecessary for achieving emotional intimacy with one’s partner. I am reminded of a scene in Star Trek: First Contact, Data and Picard are interacting physically with the Pheonix and Data asks of Picard “Does physical contact make it more real?”. Picard evades the question and tells him that it was a childhood fantasy. I understand the need for physical contact, as I do enjoy it a lot, but somehow the intercourse portion just doesn’t make sense to me. Perhaps this is because I am a non-traditional gay. I am excited by emotional intimacy and more basic feelings and less by the idea of being penetrated or penetrating.
For me personally there is a different aspect of masculinity at work that I am attracted to. I am less attracted to the power of the penis and more attracted to the power of the man. The phallus serves as a nice indicator to confirm biological pre-requisites for manhood, but it is not the only object of my interest.
We are gay, can we not take a more evolved approach to sexuality that is less carnal?
Now that blast of mental energy is out there, I will either integrate it into my current paper (on social control of gay identity) or I will carry it over and complete it in another semester as another paper.
As I always find a route of avoidance for getting actual work done when it comes to writing papers I have put a little work into my papers website. Take a look at the two images below. One is the prototype and the other is the real beta website that I’ve developed over the past week.
ANSWER: The real website screenshot is the first image. The prototype is the 2nd. My crappy bars and buttons gave it away, right?
I have decided to redesign my academic paper website. Shockingly, I have not actually written a single line of code for the new website. Instead, I have prototyped it in Adobe Illustrator. I guess you could say that I am procrastinating on working on real classwork, and you would be right. I’m not sure what to think of going to this new process of prototyping stuff before I write it. I guess I can blame my Human-Computer Interaction class for this new method. I am hoping to code the new site sometime during the summer and have it ready by fall. The coding and designing will not take me very long, but getting the abstracts, program affiliations and such assembled will be time consuming.
The current prototype appears below.
I feel like all I have done on this blog in the past few months is post about academics. Its easy to do, its practically the only thing going on in my life, and as a grad student, shouldn’t it be my life?
Oddly, I feel like I have become more of myself over the past few months. I feel less detached and less like my world operates entirely inside myself. I guess in some ways I’ve had less need for expressing myself through the blog, well, aside from having no time for it.
Academically things are going great. I have 2 papers I am desperately trying to finish and things are in progress for the fall semester in terms of a course proposal for a directed readings that I want to do on subcultural masculinity. I was not accepted into counseling, and I have been waitlisted for sociology, but in some ways none of that matters. I am currently planning to apply to the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program to extend my work in gender and sexuality into a degree-length program. I have spoken to the program director and he is eager to get my into the program, plus there are no real limits on the number of students that he can enroll due to the nature of the program. I will still be applying to the counseling program again next year, but at the same time I also anticipate applying to a PhD program in Public Policy (concentration in Social Policy). If I am admitted to counseling, I will take that track and work toward a MA and then a PhD in Counseling. If not, I will do the MA in Liberal Studies and then attempt to gain acceptance into the PhD in Public Policy. I feel like these are the two tracks that my life is able to go at this point. Public Policy is the natural conclusion to my work in gender and sexuality, counseling is the natural conclusion to psychology. Although, using the words “natural” and “conclusion” are both contrary to my present frame of mind. Nothing is really natural in socialized structures or entities of hierarchy, but the progression seems to flow in a non-forced way to my understandings of each path. As for conclusion, well, they may be terminal programs, but there is always research beyond the PhD and there is life after the doctorate is conferred, but it is the conclusion of the formal levels of understanding that exist.
Socially I feel like I’m progressing. Before entering graduate school I never really kept in contact with people from my classes and didn’t really have many people who knew much about me except for Chris. That is slowly changing. I have added new people to the circle of people I call friends for the first time in a while. I am out and open to these new friends, not only as gay, but also the more unusual aspects of the way I identity myself. I think that socially I have long had a fear of things I perceived as dark secrets of myself, and now I feel like I can be myself. I don’t feel like I have to hide from these people that I have begun interacting with. Its really sort of refreshing.
Beyond academics and friends, there isn’t a lot to report on, except sleeping weird hours and not being able to sleep near the end of a semester because there is too much going through my mind, but I suspect even the earliest days of my blog will show that this is not exactly uncommon for me. Oh, and one other important piece of info about my current life: I am happy!
This was supposed to be more metanarrative than narrative, but as usual, I have missed the mark on my posts. I am going to try to do more posts about my life, and less about academics. I really do miss being able to just spout my feelings and thoughts on the page.
These are by far the major things that are bugging me and occupying my thoughts. A final paper for Queer Theory, a final paper for Cognitive Science and a revised course proposal for my directed readings.
