Who I am / Who am I

Last week, I went to a meeting of Prescott's GSA (which apparently stands for "Gender & Sexuality Alliance" and not "Gay-Straight Alliance." Who knew?). Since it's the summer, and the club is composed mostly of college kids, it was a small meeting - a girl, a guy, my friend, and me. It was fun, but the guy, who (ostensibly?) runs the thing, warned that next time we met, classes will've started and there'll be icebreakers. I was not so happy to hear that. He tried to reassure me, explain that we'd be sharing easy, useful things like favorites (movie, music, ...shoes?) and coming out stories.

It seems to me that it'd be easier to gag someone with a knife or fork; I don't understand where the adage comes from; I wanted to be gagged with a spoon.

But here I am now, trying to think of some more effective way of explaining myself. Let's start with what you can see: I'm writing, and my name is Tony, but you could've figured that much out alone. This blog is called "Into the Med Years," because that's what it's going to be chronicling. Let's take a trip to the department of backstory:

I graduated in December of 2008 with a bachelor's degree in English. It would make you think I like the subject, wouldn't it? Nope, hardly a bit. I can't stand literature classes, I hate talking about reading, and Shakespeare and I are more old nemeses than anything else. But I am an avid reader, and I write a lot, so it seemed like the logical thing to major in. I wanted to be a plain, straight-up professional writer, and I figured college was the way to accomplish that - get through undergrad, go to a good grad school, get an MFA, make some contacts, launch my stupendous career.

Well, it didn't happen that way.

I've spent the past year (and more) researching grad schools, getting my best work together, whoring myself out to teachers for letters of recommendation, and then the applying! Picking up the mail every day was pretty awful for a few winter-spring months, believe me. But when the spring was done, I thought I was set: I was going to Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, in its MFA Fiction Writing program. A coveted position, to me and a couple thousand other kids who'd applied, and one I had wanted more than ... well, friends, maybe, since I lost a few that spring.

And then I wondered why. Why I wanted it, I mean. It took months to remind myself that going to grad school for writing wasn't what I had to do, and if I wanted to do something else - and I was jonesing at that point - I could. I hadn't made any big mistakes yet, but I might, and soon.

So here I am. Many moons later, and I've given up my spot in Sarah Lawrence's coveted program. What am I doing instead? Well, that's taken a while to figure out, too, but I've always been interested in science. I thought for a while about being a paleontologist, which is what I wanted to be when I was a kid; I thought about being an astronomer, which was more of an adult interest; and I thought about medicine, which combines everything and has been omnipresent, though I only started seriously thinking about it as a career last summer, one term away from my degree.

So, yes, I have a degree in English, and while I may not like the subject much I'm still proud of it. In the mean time, I have to start again: My goal is to be a doctor, but I'll need at least two years of prerequisite studies before I'm even ready to think about medical school. I'm also thinking about becoming a nurse along the way, but this is only a start. There'll be much more to come.

One more thing: You've figured it out from the paragraphs above, but I'm a gay man. I've never worn a rainbow flag in my life, but I'm starting to realize that it isn't a part of me that I can relegate to masturbation and short stories. I may not be the next Milk, but I'll probably write about it a good deal here, along with medicine, and probably anything else that catches my interest. All in all, I don't know what to expect, and neither should you. But, hey, I'm reading Life of Pi, and I never expected a tiger in a lifeboat, so what the hell?