The Islander – Part 11: In The Band – Part 2

All I learned about football I learned through marching band. So basically, after spending nine years of participating in marching band from high school to college and in my professional life, I barely understand the broad outlines of the game.

But…I loved being in marching band.

I don’t know why and how I fell in love with marching band so quickly. Standing in the rain my sophomore year being yelled at to stand at attention, turn quarter turns in unison, and be trained to be yell in loud responses was really alien to me. Remember I had never been in an organized sports team, I had never done anything like a drill with other people in unison, I had never really watched a football game, or actually seen a marching band perform. You’d think with that background I wouldn’t like standing in the rain being yelled at…but something about it made sense and felt great.

Marching band taught me one ways that human beings bond is through suffering. As humans have evolved, many of us live with layers of privilege that shield us from the types of suffering that helped  our ancestors develop a sense of community, which is essential for human meaning. Examples of the ways we create suffering are as interesting as they are absurd: golf, dance marathons, running marathons, and trying to coordinate line art on a football field with a couple other hundred teenagers while playing glorified noisemakers, otherwise known as a marching band.

There was cheering, playing pop songs, being miserable in the rain, and it all felt right because it all made me feel like I belonged. My high school marching band was what I call a “family style” marching band. The focus was more on having fun, and feeling successful and included than marching at a competitions, which we didn’t do. I’m so glad that this band was like this because I was in this group with seniors who had been in this band for four years, and sophomores in my grade who had been playing their instrument for at least four years, while I had only been playing for a couple month. However, none of that seemed to matter, I was in the band.

Marching season eventually turned into concert band which opened me up to a whole world of music. There was basketball pep, which was a blast. Again, I barely understood the game, but it didn’t matter. It was about being in a tribe, chanting, playing and screaming.

I fell so hard for band, my senior year before my senior year I came up with the crazy idea to be a TA for the freshmen band. I continued my math tutoring work, and PE independent studies, which I needed to do to make space in my schedule to take band and orchestra, and somehow my parents helped make this work for me.

I loved my time with those freshmen, but more than anything, what I loved the most ways helping through marching band season. It gave me the taste of teaching that I would later find out was my calling.  Those freshmen meant more to me than many of the seniors in my class, and I often think back at these wonderful people I had the opportunity to mentor.  

When I looked for colleges, one of the factors I considered was finding a college that had a “family style” marching band, and I’m so glad that I did, because I would not have made it through college without my band family.  It was in that band family I met my wife.

It all started with the fight song.  Joining band in high school forever changed my life, and set in me in a wonderful direction that has taken me places beyond my understood potential, and to experience I never imagined and will never forget.

The Islander – Part 10: In The Band – Part 1

I was cold, I was wet, and I was exhausted, and I was having the time of my life.

In the amphitheater outside of the lunch room, the marching band was having their moment. At the end of every game, we’d march back from the football field and stand in rows on the large circular steps. After playing music and marching for the community, the students, and the football team, we would play music for ourselves. This specific evening, the band was playing for us, the seniors in the band after our last game. In the pouring rain, we danced in the center, surrounded by the band, joyously dancing.

Most people started band in 6th grade, I didn’t start until sophomore year. When it came time to do band, choir, or orchestra in middle school, my choice was easy. I had been playing violin since I was 6 years-old, I was really good at it, so I went with orchestra. Throughout middle school I was satisfied with my choice. I was the best violinist in orchestra. This was a really nice feeling since I wasn’t popular, I was bad at sports, and while I did fine academically, I never feel like one of the smartest people in the room.

I’d hear the band play during our music concerts, and their renditions of “Hot Cross Buns,” other typical middle school band music didn’t impress me.

My brother, Ed is three years older than me and had gotten into playing piano for the high school jazz band. So, when I was a freshmen, and he was a senior, with his help I got into jazz band as a pianist. It was a whole new world, a style of music that I hadn’t played before, and it was fun. I knew about brass and woodwind instruments, but I had never seen people play them like these upperclassmen did (Jazz band was an auditioned group that usually only included upperclassmen).

One day in jazz band, our teacher announced that the drill team needed a recording of the fight song to work on their routine for the football game. Since all of the jazz band kids except for me and my brother were in marching band and they were some of the best players, it was a simple enough thing to do. I’ll never forget one of the drummers strapping on a set of quads marching drums and being absolutely in awe as he warmed-up.

I watched memorized as they band played through the fight song. The percussion parts were fast and kinetic. The moving bass line was driving and powerful and the flute parts sparkled. Counter lines weaved in and out of the melody and the break strain with its chants was like nothing I had ever heard before. I had no idea that music could be this. It was one of most unforgettable musical performance I had ever heard in my life.

I didn’t know how to play any band instruments, I had never seen a marching band, I had no idea how hard it would be to stand on a football field for hours learning to march, and how uncomfortable it would be to wear a uniform for an entire football game. But in that moment, I decided that I was going to join the band.

The Islander – Part 9: Why Girl-friends?

The first time I was called “Gay” was my freshmen year of high school.

This bullying was based on the fact that I was hanging out with girls a lot of the time. This logic made no sense to me as I knew that I was straight. I was very aware of my straightness and my sexual attraction at this age, so I had no doubt that I was not a homosexual, but I also knew that it was girls who made me feel good about myself in the platonic relationships I shared with them. As much as I wanted to do something to keep these bullies at bay, having friends was not really something I was willing to sacrifice to be “cool.”

I tried to socialize with other boys. I could talk video games, and throw around insults and other jokes, but there was a lack of depth in our conversations. Also, there was so much that the other boys, namely sports, talked about that I wasn’t interested in discussing. While there were things that girls talked about that weren’t my interest like fashion, their conversations about these topics didn’t seem as exclusionary as the ones boys talked about.

Even though I knew that my relationships with my girl-friends were abnormal, there was enough space in high school and college for me to foster these relationships. As I entered adulthood, a door seemed to shut. One reason I love being a teacher is that I have the space to become friends with women, as the in schools there is proportionately higher amount of women in the field than in many other industries. However, like I mentioned before, the extension of girl-friends from the work place to hanging out outside of school is tricky.

Didn’t sex get in the way of these relationships with my girl-friends? This is one of those things that I have found as an interesting point of discussions. One of the main arguments ala when Harry Met Sally is that men and women cannot be friends because of sex.



The idea is that a guy can’t have a conversation with a woman because he will be thinking too much about having sex with her to focus on other aspects of her humanity. And without a sexual aspect of the relationship to somehow manage this tension like in a marriage relationships, two people of different genders can’t engage in a meaningful relationship.

This idea sets low expectations for men. It excuses them for mismanaging expressions of their own sexuality, and sets up for failures in their relationships with women. Men in this model are excused for not developing ways of acknowledging all the facets of a women’s identity. Also, the idea that a sexual relationship is somehow essential sets people up for strange relationship dynamics. Yes, sexual compatibility is very important in a long-term partnered monogamous relationship, however a strong sexual connection cannot overcome other issues in a relationship.

Did I think about my girl-friends sexually at times? Yes. Did I ever have crushes on them? Sometimes. However, for the most part I didn’t act on these feelings. Some of this had to do with a lack of confidence but moreover it was because after a while, like a sister, I didn’t see them that way. Mentally acknowledging sexuality does not have to lead to action, and there was simply more important parts of my relationships that was worth maintaining without a sexual expression.

We seek in our friends things that we see in ourselves. As an Asian boy, I didn’t see a lot of me on the surface in my peers, so I looked for people like my own mom who were interesting in talking about how they saw the world.

Women and femininity have always fascinated me. I remember putting on my mom’s jewelry, trying on her make-up and playing dress up with her clothing. When I was kindergarten age, I learned through society that there were gender roles in society that I had to abide by. So I sought out other ways to explore femininity.

There were limited outlets for this. My main extracurricular activity was music lessons, which were not very social. The popular culture that I enjoyed, comics, books, and sci-fi/fantasy were from male perspectives, created by men, and most often focused on male characters. Then the 1990s Disney animated film renaissance came, and I had a way to explore women in our culture. Film like The Little Mermaid, and Beauty and The Beast were by no means ideas ways for me to explore and thinking about women, however it was what I got. Because the films were so popular and omnipresent, it wasn’t weird for me to be into them. Okay maybe it a was a little odd for me to buy the The Little Mermaid song book and sing those songs until I had them all memorized. However, it didn’t feel as much a push against gender expectations as wearing a dress.

I’ll never forget being in a book store in New York and seeing The Little Mermaid song book at the endcap of a shelf. It was a beat up copy but I was still so excited and surprised to see that such a book even existed. I treasured that thing, using it to learn all of the lyrics and eventually play the song son the piano.

I watched this generation of Disney films as much or more than I watched the Star Wars films….which I watched all of the time.

As I got into high school the way to explore the female experience narrowed to the point that the only way to understanding myself as well as others was through girl-friends. There were a few books I read in high school which ended up being some of my favorites like I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, and The Color Purple, helped me betters understand women, but the vast majority of the books, and the curriculum I learned were from male perspectives.

I am so grateful to the girl-friends I had in high school for going outside of the norm to be my friend.  I'm sure their boyfriends and other people made comments to them about hanging out with me, but they never told me about these issues. 

I don't know what my life would have been like without these girl-friends but what I do know is that they were the friendly faces who said hello to me in the hallways, made me feel needed by valuing my advice, and supported me through those years. 

The Islander – Part 8: Girl-friends vs. Girlfriends

One of the things that I missed the most about high school and college are my girl-friends.

For this post, I’m making a distinction between “girlfriends” a person that a male-identified straight person has as a romantic and sexual partner, and a “girl-friend,” who is platonic female identified friend to a male-identified straight person. I’m not saying that Gay identified men do not have “girl-friends,” but taking account to my positionality, and the point of this post, we are talking about what it means for a straight guy (me) to have girl-friends high school.

Recently, I made a list of all of my close friends in high school and about a quarter of them were men.

In high school the social environment gave me more freedom to interact socially with woman then in my adult life. There were more corners of schools, conversations in hallways, and situations in music classes that provided me the time and space to hang out with my girl-friends. As an adult, I have found less and less that there is socially accepted for me to hang out with women who are friends. In block parties, I find all of the women are talking in a group, and all of the men segregate themselves into a separate group. Think about it for a second, for me as a married man, to ask another married woman out to go watch a movie is usual, and raises eye-brows.

My connection to women as friends goes all the way back to my mother. She has been an amazing mother all my life, but she has also been a close friend. She would listen to me talk about all kinds of things, and helped me discover many of the things I loved about myself. Many of my favorite activities as a child were associated with my mom like grocery shopping, and cooking in the kitchen.

I didn’t connect with other boys as a young child. Most of them were into sports, and I wasn’t. Hanging out with them in recess never worked out so well, because the talk and activities were sports-centric. In girls, I found people, like my mom, who were as interested in talking about life as much as I did.

In Montessori kindergarten, one of my best friends was a little white girl with curly hair. We would play all of the time together. She would lead me around the room, and at some point, she kissed me. This was all confusing, but what I did get is that my life made more sense with her as a friend.

Middle School was more of the same. I did eventually join up with a group of guys one year younger than me who were into comic books, (which I loved at that age) than sports. We would talk comics during recess as opposed to playing sports. While this developed, I found strong connections with girls during class, and the in the hallways.

I knew at this age that it wasn’t normal to have girl-friends. I don’t remember other kids making comments to me about this in middle school, but I do remember some teachers having a laugh about how “chummy” I was with some girls. It wasn’t until high school where this starting feeling more and more out of place.

The Islander – Part 7: Alice's Cigarette

We sat down on the back porch next to each other in silence as the chill of the night air encouraged me to pull my arms across my chest. Alice pulled the oversized hoodie over her knees as she brought her legs up close to her. Out of the font of her sweatshirt, she pulled out a pack of cigarettes. She snapped them down violently, and I asked her what she was doing. She smiled and explained that this helped pack the tobacco down. I felt embarrassed for a moment but then she gently closed her eyes and smiled assuring me that she found my question endearing.

I watched her hands move through the ritual of lighting a cigarette. Her fingers moved with a choreographed elegance as the lighter appeared with the sleight of hand of a magician. I watched the fire ignite a deep orange glow as she inhaled gently through the end of the cigarette. There was something knowing and confident about the way that she smoked, but also revealing and vulnerable.

Cigarette ash broke off as she flicked the back of the cigarette with her thumb. It trickled down off the porch and disappeared into the darkness of the backyard. Slowly she raised her chin up, and gently blew up the smoke into the air in commune with the night air.

I first noticed Alice during a basketball game, sitting in the corner of the bleachers reading a book. As a senior, I had learned to love playing in the pep band. So, when I saw her sitting down away from the band cradling a marching band horn and reading a book, my instinct were to try to get her involved.

I walked over and tried to encourage her to cheer with everyone else. She looked up from her book, looked down at the space next to her inviting me to sit down. Completely ignoring my first overture she said, “Hello, my name is Alice.” As I sat down and stumbled through my own introduction, she interrupted calmly, “I know who you are.” She wasn’t like any other freshmen I had met, or any other girl I had met. She was confident, calm, and seemed to have it all figured out even though by most people’s standards, her life was a train wreck.

The most amazing thing about her is that she saw the true me more than I saw myself and she never let me be anything but honest and real with her. At the same time, she challenged my ideas, my assumptions, and my reality.

The dominant narrative of what was right and wrong, bled into my understanding of who was good and bad. The -isms implicit in the DARE program of my middle school years and how different systems of oppression used drugs as a way to maintain a destructive status quo were not understood in my 17 year-old mind. However, this didn’t mean that this influence was not reflective in my world view.

The message was that drugs were bad, drinking was bad, and smoking was the gateway to destructive behavior. Only certain types of people did these things in teenage years, but there was Alice. A freshman soon to become my best friend. She challenged all of this with her grace, her authenticity and a cigarette.

The Islander – Part 6: Alone At Lunch

Y’know how there’s that scene in almost every teen movie when they explain the lunchroom and the all the social dynamics?



I can’t really do that scene, because well, I never actually ate in my high school’s lunch room. When I was a freshmen, the lunch room was nicknamed the “mushroom.” The message that we got as freshmen, or at least I got was to find somewhere else to eat. I don’t know if it was because it was too small, but it was not a welcoming place.

People found corners of the school to eat.  Students would eat in hallways, or outside. I had two other people I was friends with in middle school.  We found a place to eat near locker bays by the orchestra room. One of the friends got into the social dynamics of his sports team so he went to eat with them, and other one would eat with other friends, so there was a time that I ate lunch by myself.

It sucked on a level, but in some ways, I preferred it. I’m not great in large groups or at parties now, and I wasn’t back then. I didn’t know how to take the chance and unlike college, no one really took me under their wing to help me navigate the lunchroom situation. However, I knew that this wasn’t right. Not just because of society told me that friends were important, but because I wanted to have a group...and sometimes I was lonely.

In middle school I had a group of 7th graders when I was in 8th grade that I felt were a group I belonged to, but I didn’t have them with me in high school. The fact that I spent so much time with them in middle school meant that I didn’t really build relationships with kids my own age. Everyone else seemed to have their group. I didn’t know how to find that, and it was easier to not try than to take a chance. That could have been it for me, sitting by myself eating lunch outside in the locker bay or in the back hallway by the orchestra room for my entire time in high school…and that was pretty much it for me my freshmen year.

When I joined band my sophomore year (which is a whole different story), I noticed that a group of people ate lunch in the band office. The office comfortably fit maybe three people but we managed to fit sometimes as many as six. The band teachers would often let us hang there, and even sit at their desks. Sometimes they would kick us out, but more often than not they would let us have the space to hang out.

Some days it would be me and one other person, and other days it would be full. There were people there like me who sometimes felt more of a connection with people who weren’t their own age, and other people simply felt something important being in the space and presence of these teachers.

That’s where I ate lunch sophomore through senior year. There were not always people in that office but I never felt lonely being alone in that space because I felt like I belonged. This was more important to me than trying to navigate the lunchroom or being cool. It was the “dorky” thing to do to hang out with the band folk in a teacher’s office for lunch every day, but it was all I could figure out. I didn’t feel great about how this made people perceive me, but it was all I had.

Sometimes having something that marks you by others as less than, but make you feel belonging is a choice we have to make. It would be a choice I would continue to make the rest of my life, and it was a choice that eventually made look forward to lunch time and having a moment that I could be myself.

The Islander – Part 5: The District

I was a Panther first, then a Gator, and  finally an Islander. Don’t you love the lack of logic of mascots, and often lack of cultural thought given to these labels?  My elementary school was Island Park Elementary (the Panthers), then there was Islander Middle School (the Gators) and finally Mercer Island High School Islanders ugh).
Panthers and Gators were not indigenous to the Northwest, so that was a weird choice. The fact the the high school mascot had a implication of nativity, being of an island, and also the racial connotation being Polynesian, is even more baffling and begs reexamination. Mascots that take upon racial identity or imply them need to be dropped.

Three elementary school, one middle school, and one high school make up the Mercer Island School District. Middle school was the point in where was the chaos of three elementary schools worth of students combining occurred. This meant that the transition in high school was mostly with the same group of students. This allowed students to carry on and develop relationships but also meant that baggage from years past were carried from middle school to high school.

The first part of the trilogy, elementary and middle school was mostly positive. It was a time of confusion, but the love and belief my parents had in all of the facets of who I am helped me not be bothered by what didn’t make sense. It was this foundation from my family that helped me work through not being what the messaging of my school told me.

In math, my teachers told me I should be able to do math in my head, and my PE teacher even at a young age made me feel less than during fitness tests. However, my limited awareness as a child made this seem more normal than traumatic

I wanted to be like others who were good at sports  not because of their athletic prowess but because of the admiration that these athletic abilities engendered. I didn’t understand yet that this desire worked against the development of my own identity and who I wanted to be.

If the external influences of peers, teachers and cultured didn’t reinforce gender, cultural and social norms in high school, maybe my understanding of my true self would have occurred in high school and not college. However, this was not the case, and as the messaging became stronger later in middle school, the upcoming conflict filled me with a sense of anxiety.

What comforted me was this idea that like Corey, I would find my Topanga, that the high school fantasy and its pursuits would bring me happiness. Like the first part of a trilogy, there was more hope than dread, unaware of the specter unknown and unseen.

The Islander – Part 4: To Call Someone Gay

I acted the best way I knew how to; I just wish I knew more. I wish my empathy muscle in high school was strong enough to fight against the norms to stand and say something, but it wasn’t. While I would never accept myself or people close to me saying the things that I said in high school or keeping quiet while other people said similar things, I’ve had to learn to accept that I did in fact make jokes about homosexuality in high school.

In high school I couldn’t throw a ball (I still can’t). I can’t talk sports, though I’ve learned how to fact it in my adult years. I’m small guy and though I’m more in shape than I’ve ever been in my life, I’m not physically intimidating or impressive. I never will be. The one thing I do got that fits within the narrow stereotype of masculine expression is that I can dish it out. I can insult people and take them apart and come up with great comebacks quickly and succinctly. This is one reason I’m good at teaching middle school students. While I never insult my students intentionally, when I get attitude from my students, I almost always have a response back that can take that comment apart or move the conversations in another direction.

The boys in my high school talked about sex all of the time, and this is one reason why almost all of my close friends were girls, which I’ll get deeper into in a later post. It wasn’t the subject that I disliked, but how they talked about it. There was bragging, jokes about anatomy, demeaning comments about women, that I knew were wrong. Even then I had a feminist streak. Every guy had jokes that were made about them, like some weird community agreement amongst the guys. Some guys received the fat jokes, other ones got made fun of because they walked funny, and one of the categories of insults I got was around my sexuality.

The logic was that because I didn’t fit traditional male gender roles, I was gay. I knew more Broadway shows than professional sports teams, I played the violin, and I was a sci-fi/comic book geek. Therefore, I was made fun of as being gay. The way I handled this was spitting it right back, and because my comebacks were fast and creative, I managed to deflect these horrible words with insults of my own. For the most part this worked. It worked so well that it actually became a game, and one of my friends Sam, was the master at this game.

My senior year I managed to have an open period, (I don’t know how with all of the music classes I took) We would sit in this table in the center of the library and attempt to do homework. It was me, Sam, Kate, and some other people who would join us every so often. We would got into it with the gay jokes, and Sam took it much further than I did, but I laughed along. I used the word “gay” to mean to stupid, to demean others, Sam used the F-word (the Gay insult). I laughed at it, but even then, it felt wrong so I didn’t go there. This doesn’t mean I didn’t do anything wrong because I didn’t speak up against Sam’s use of it and what I know now is hate speech.

I contributed to a hostile environment toward my peers who were LGBTQ+, and even though I didn’t know anyone who was out, I’m sure my actions contributed to that fact. The idea of “Gay-ness” and homosexual was just out there, not in my sense of my community. Even though I made these jokes, I appreciate people who I knew were homosexuals like Elton John, George Michael and Freddie Mercury who were heroes of mine in high school. It was like I was making jokes about an abstraction, an idea that was not real.

Like President Obama, I have evolved. When I got to Northwestern University, I made one gay joke and I was shut down quickly by people in marching band, and I never made another.  It didn't take a lot of explanation for me to understand that there was another way surrounded by a more inclusive norms.

I sang and performed with confident and masterful musicians who were out and proud. I came to understand that my freedom to be a different kind of straight man who did not follow gender norms came from these individuals who created a reality that being a man meant more than what I saw in my peers in high school. More important than what people who were LGBTQ+ did for my life, I came to know and understand that they were human beings like me who deserved the rights as I did. In the same way came to be proud of who I was and not take crap from others who questioned my masculinity, I learned that others, most of all from me, should never hear words that make them question or feel bad for the who they are, and/or who they want to be.

I feel shame, regret, and sadness for all of the horrible things I said in high school. If I could travel back in time and talk to my high school self. I would tell myself to breakup with my girlfriend and more importantly stop making gay jokes, and stand up against people who do. If somehow, I got that message in high school, I wouldn’t have wasted so much time degrading my soul for the laughs of others who didn’t care about me and I would have sooner come to understand the person that I would become.

I have more work to do. I can do more to support the LGBTQ+ community and I have an enormous responsibility to help my children understand the LGBTQ+ experience in America with all of its nuance and diversity. I’ve made progress, but there’s more evolution ahead of me.

I’m so sorry to any of my high school peers who I made feel less than for words that I said. I was wrong to make jokes about homosexuality, and I will continue to spend my life making my family, my school, and my community and more diverse and inclusive space for LGBTQ+ people.

This I promise.

The Islander – Part 3: The Island

I grew up on an island.
When people think about islands in the Northwest, they often think of small communities that can only be reached by ferries. Filled with bed and breakfasts and quaint shops these islands in the northern part Puget Sound are in fact really nice to visit and get brunch.

I didn’t grow up on one of those islands. I grew up on an island that had I-90 going through it.

Mercer Island is located in Lake Washington which is a lake just east of Seattle. On the other side of this lake is Bellevue, the largest suburb of Seattle. This city is a middle/upper class community with more Starbucks per capita then is logical and a feeling of serenity despite the fact that there is a freeway that intersects the north part of the island.

Diversity in this island was unique when I grew up. With very few African-Americans and a large Jewish and Asian-America population, my sense of racial normality didn’t reflect much of America. I had no concept that Jewish people were a minority. I didn’t have any friends who were Black or African-American until college because, there were so few in my community.

Systems of oppression were clearly present in retrospect, but growing up on this island I had no concept of the racism and classism that informed the make-up of this city. There was a sense of preservation and control in this city. If there was an option to turn the bridges that connected us to Bellevue and Seattle into draw bridges, many people on this island would probably be in favor of this medieval idea to keep the others out.

The desire to create a feeling of a safe community was a desire to do the best for the children in the city as much as it was an expression of unacknowledged bias and insecurities. The outsides of houses and cars that were parked outside often were not reflected in what was actually inside of the house and the lifestyle of its occupants.

Like in high school, conformity was a measure of success.  Differences were only embraced if they didn’t threaten mainstream narrative of whiteness.

That doesn’t mean that this island wasn’t a wonderful place to grow up. The issues related to this community were not unique, and despite these problems recognize there was a much good that occurred in this city.

The island was filled with friendly people, wonderful parks, and great cultural opportunities. You could find on this island, as my family did, amazing private music teachers, a wide variety of ethnically diverse and restaurants, and a wonderful youth theater.  Since the island was used by Starbucks to try out a lot of different designs and innovations, we had a lot of Starbucks. This may not be seen as a good thing by some, but growing up, these places provided a feeling of comfort.

The island felt like a college campus. One could drive around the entire island in half an hour and feel a sense of safety in every corner of this city. Walking down the quiet streets on warm summer nights as a teenager, this city felt like a place apart from the chaos of the world, somehow better, and somehow right, innocent, and idealized.

Senior year my family moved off the island to Bellevue.  I visited the island a couple times the following year when I visited from college but since then I haven't been back.  Part of this has to do the with my relationships with my high school peers after high school.  The other piece is a little harder to articulation.  I have great memories of Mercer Island but I don't miss this place. 

We miss things that somehow feel incomplete.  This feeling can change over time.  I missed my maternal grandmother for a year or two after she passed away, but I don't miss her anymore.  I have fond thoughts about her, and I'm proud that I knew her.  I came to a point where I understood that the time we spent together was enough, and I was blessed to have the time to hold her in my heart. 

My time on my island was enough for me.  When I did miss Mercer Island, I missed the idea more than the reality.  The older I got the more I realized the idea wasn't real, and was a fantasy that would pull me away from who I wanted to and needed to become. 

The Islander – Part 2: The Fantasy

Part 2:

I see in Ollie, my 6 years old, the fantasies of my childhood. Like Ollie, when I was a child, my fantasies were those of Disney movies, superheroes and Lego sets. I would create complex stories an scenarios to process the world around me and escape with a sense of creation and control that often feels out of reach to children. In Star Wars films, comics books, I was able to replay and deconstruct human interactions and through fantasy figure out what reality was, could, and meant to my experience as a human being.

As I got older, a different kind of fantasy entered my life.

When I watched my favorite cartoon, Batman: The Animated Series. I would follow up watching this show with playing with my toys and pretending in playgrounds that I was Batman. However, I never had any illusions that I could ever actually be Batman. I  was keenly aware even as a child that as much fun it was to pretend to be Batman, this was a fantasy that could never play out.

As I got older into my teenage year and my thoughts about my future came to the fore, I found myself watching less cartoons and got into two other shows that became my favorites, The Wonder Years and Boy Meets World. Unlike my fantasies around superheroes, I didn’t see these shows as unrealistic depictions of what my life could be like, instead I saw these fantasies as realities to pursue.



In the 1990s an explosion in teen-centric culture occurred in popular music, television shows, and films. While there were many shows like Buffy, The Vampire Slayer that addressed issues related to the high school experience with thought, and insights (albeit in a genre which included vampires, with actors who were not teenager).



Other art, like the numerous teen-sploitation films (She’s All That was great, but many were horrible) added to a distorted caricature of high school that is more dramatic, less diverse, over-sexualized, and wholly unrealistic. But my classmates and I didn’t realize that as we moved through middle school and created goals, and priorities for our high school reality, the fantasies we were consuming.

The drama, the independence, and to my male cis-gendered, heterosexual teenage mind, the sexual dynamics and expressions of masculinity that I now understand as destructive, seemed attractive, and in some ways was seductive.

This confusion set up my generation to pursue unrealistic fantasies that come into conflict with a better, more meaningful and realistic reality. Instead of caring and focusing on friends who were real, we pursued friends we thought we should have. Instead of expressing joy in what we loved to do, we pretended to like what we felt would help us fit in, and instead of embracing and celebrating diversity, we fought for a status quo to bring us predictability and comfort at the cost of our self-esteem.

This tension didn’t always end up negatively, but it had to be overcome to accomplish positivity for ourselves and our community.

Unfortunately this pursuit of unrealistic fantasies wasn't limited to my high school...

The Islander – Part 1: Introduction

In the past eleven years, this blog has left few subjects in my life in the shadows. I started this blog writing about my love of music, I wanted to let my thoughts and wonders about the art of music out into the open. Slowly the blog evolved to reflect the changes in my life. While music will always be my hobby and part of my professional life, my thought and experiences in my life pulled focus away from music, and the blog reflected this change.

First it was posts about this little puppy name Buffy, then running, politics, college, parenthood, and then teaching. These subjects are more the norm in this blog because more than music these subjects are what is at the certain of my life, my energy and where I find the most meaning in my life.

This blog also has been a way that I could process and better understand challenges in my life. There was an early post about my having shingles, and then I went deeper. I wrote about having Crohn’s disease, challenging times with Buffy. Other difficult moments, including struggles with parenthood.  I wrote about openly, facets of my identity, and deaths in my family. There are a couple things that I haven’t written about in my life on this blog. One these topics I haven’t discussed (except for this one post) was my time in high school.

My time in college was meaningful but it has a simpler narrative. It’s was the final chapter of a trilogy. As I wrote about in these post, I had my mentors, my tribulation, and my tribe. I left college knowing myself and with an amazing partner, Diana, ready for the next adventure in life.

High was school was that darker second film in the trilogy for me. It was a time of feeling lost, not knowing my place, with an ending that felt incomplete. The road ahead after high school not well understood as high school.  My teenage years didn’t give me the space and permission to fully be myself. When I graduated from high school I was both relieved to be done with high school but I also wanted to stay.  This was despite the knowledge that even though I knew that even though my time at this place benefited me, it was a place that didn’t truly see me.

I feel less confident writing about my time at high school than my experiences with racism. I don’t know why, but I think that’s why I need to write about this time in my life. It has been more than twenty years since I started high school and in a year, it will be twenty years since graduating. Memories from high school, like ghosts, visit me, and instead of facing them, I have chosen to ignore them, and in that process push aside experience I need to better understand to better know myself.

So let’s do this. [inhale, 1…2…3…4…5 exhale]

I’ll tell you about the island that I grew up on and fantasies left unfulfilled. I’ll describe those tore me down and how in my responses to them, I only aided them in their pursuits. There are teachers I will write about who inspired me, and peers who made me feel less than. There are those individuals I will honor, the most unlikely of friends who showed me love and showed me a path to learn to fully be myself be and love myself.

Welcome to Mercer Island High School, home of the Islanders.