The Great Interview Experiment

When signing up for the experiment, I feared the person I would end up interviewing would be someone I'd be hard pressed coming up with ten questions for.  Lucky for me, I ended up with the pleasure of interviewing Nathan from Okay City - and finding yet another feed to add to my Google Reader!  (Like I needed another.)  And, although he didn't answer the super secret burning bonus question I sent in my email to him (BAD NATHAN!) the whole thing was really a good time anyway.

So, without further adieu, I present, Ten Questions With Nathan:

1. You say that you weren't raised with any specific religion, but  now you identify as a Christian.  In my experience, most religions aren't exactly embracive of lifestyles outside the norm of a nuclear family unit and I think that's crap.  How do you reconcile being a gay man and a Christian?

   Man, Kathleen, you're not foolin' around! What an awesome question to lead off with.

   My flippant answer, the one I usually give to this question is, "I don't. Why would you even bother?"

   But that's often taken as disrespectful, so I've stopped saying it.  There is a long version of how I reconcile these things, and it involves questions of cultural context in the Bible, and translations of Greek words, and feminism, and liberation theology. But what it eventually boils down to is that Christians are constantly resolving difficult moral issues by referring back to the Big Rule: Compassion.  You can interpret scripture compassionately; we do it with all those verses that seem to promote slavery, or genocide, or that require us to stone people who commit the tiniest crimes.

   We appeal to compassion because we recognize that the overarching message of the Bible is that we should be really, really nice to each other, especially to the people that everyone else is being really, really mean to. That's what Jesus was all about: be nice, treat each other well, share what you have, and stop worrying so much about whether or not everyone else behaves or believes exactly like you do.  When I realized that this applied to gay people, coming out was the next natural step.

   Two years ago I wrote a post about my own journey to accept myself as a gay man. You can read it here.

2. Where'd you pick up the skills for the Blue Ribbon Chili?  Perhaps you'll share the recipe?

   All my skills in the kitchen are ones I come by honestly. Both my parents are excellent cooks, and we grew up eating very, very well - fresh vegetables from my dad's garden and hand-made, fresh food. As soon as I was able I started learning how to cook.

   When I was twelve years old we moved from our tiny town in western Oklahoma to Oklahoma City. My mom had a job that occasionally kept her at work until after 9 p.m., and she took me aside and said, "Okay.  When I work late, I need you to make dinner. It should be on the table when I get home." She showed me how to make simple things like beef stroganoff from the powdered mix, and steaks on the broiler, and lasagna.

   When Brian and I moved into our house I dedicated myself to becoming a better cook. My family has a tradition of getting together once every two or three weeks for dinner, and the rule is that as often as possible we must try new recipes. This has kept me on my culinary toes. The thing to learning how to cook - how to do anything, really - is to start with what you know and just go for it. Let yourself suck at it, because eventually you'll get better. Read what other people have done and try to replicate their success. You're going to make some truly awful, inedible things, but you'll learn, and improve.

   I once heard some wonderful advice about baking, and I think it applies to all of cooking, and possibly all of life. Rich Mullins said: "Bake a cake - a really rich cake, preferably from scratch (and especially if you are an inexperienced baker or a tested, tried and notoriously awful cook). The value is in the baking more than in the cake. Call up some enemy of yours and invite that enemy to eat the cake with you. If the cake is good you may lose an enemy and gain a friend. If the cake is bad, at least vengence is sweet."

   The chili recipe is a special one to me because I used to make it in college for all my doubtful, East Coast friends; everyone always loves it, and because it has so many weird ingredients it smacks of gourmet cooking when really it's incredibly simple. I got it off a magnet that I've had for at least fifteen years. The recipe is here.

3. I'm sure getting in to Yale was no easy task. Do you ever regret leaving?

   This is going to sound arrogant, but getting into Yale was one of the easiest things I've ever done. It was definitely easier, from a logistical standpoint, than getting into the University of Oklahoma, where I actually earned a master's degree. For OU I had to take the GRE, and they lost my application, and it was literally the day before they let out for Christmas that I found out I'd been accepted to start in January, three weeks later. It was a pain. But here's how Yale happened:

   My senior year of college was a really, really disappointing time for me, not least because I was applying for jobs and cool post-college things left and right and getting more rejection letters than I knew how to handle. I was rejected from Teach for America, from AmeriCorps, from just about everything that you can be. I'd have been rejected from the Peace Corps if I'd applied. I met with a career counselor at my university, who looked at my resume and said, "Well, Bill Clinton is setting up his office in Harlem and his people will be here next week for interviews."

   "Great," I asked. "Can I get one?"

   "No."

   Which pretty much sums up my entire senior year. I was sort of against standardized testing at the time, and so poor that I couldn't have afforded it had I not been, so I never took the GRE. My favorite philosophy professor told me I'd be making a mistake if I didn't go into ministry, and told me to apply to Yale Divinity School. They didn't require the GRE, and, almost laughing at myself, I applied. My boyfriend at the time paid my application fee; literally all I did was sit down for 15 minutes and write 3 short essays. It was the only acceptance letter I got that year. Basically the lesson here is that anyone with a 3.4 GPA and at least one decent recommendation can attend Yale Divinity School.

   I don't regret dropping out, because my return to Oklahoma was one of the best things I've ever done for myself. The only thing I'd say I regret is not finding out whether or not I was up to the challenge. I suspect that, had I been my usual self, and not the depressed, pot-smoking, Manhattan-wandering burnout I was at the time, I'd have been more than up to it. But oh well; I always say it's cooler to be a Yale dropout than a Yale graduate.

4. I notice that you've been on a Rufus Wainwright tear lately.  He also rocks my world.  Have you seen him do any of the Judy Garland stuff?  Yum!  I think he's hot and has a beautiful voice.  Why do you love him?

   I adore Rufus for the same reason I adore Patty Griffin, Billie Holiday, Tina Turner, Janis Joplin, and Judy Garland herself: because no one has a voice like that, and when I hear it, it automatically gives me goosebumps. There's soul and passion and pain in everything he sings. "Poses" is one of my favorite albums of all time, and it doesn't hurt that he's absolutely adorable.

5. You've taken on a lot of home improvement projects lately. I have this pesky plumbing problem...  Actually, what I really want to know is, where did you pick up those jack-of-all-trades skills?

   I have to say that the real jack-of-all-trades is my adorable other half, Brian. He'll tell you that he grew up learning how to fix houses and cars because his dad's a cheapskate, and believed that if you can fix it yourself, there's no reason to pay someone to do it for you.  This has inspired me over the last several years, and I just decided that I'd learn how to do some of these things as well. I have a natural curiosity that drives me, and when I see someone who knows how to do something I don't, I immediately get curious and want to see if I can do it myself. Usually, I can't, not at first anyway, but I find that if you stick with something long enough, you'll get better.

   I do have a great story for people who don't take up home repair for fear of their own ineptitude. I have a good friend whose parents met and were married in the early 1970's. They randomly decided they'd start a home repair business - building patios, fixing the plumbing, etc. - but had absolutely no knowledge or skill at any of it. So, they bought the Time-Life home repair library, and when someone would call them and, say, want a new patio, they'd go to the book - "How do we build a patio?" And they'd go step-by-step from the book, building a patio, or fixing people's plumbing, or whatever. In today's lawsuit-happy world that kind of thing wouldn't fly, but it's always reminded me that the know-how is out there, if I just keep looking and asking, trying and sucking, and eventually, learning.

6. I have three and regret none of them.  Do you regret either of your tattoos?

   Absolutely not! I love my tattoos, and I want more of them, but just haven't taken the time to get any more. I'm constantly telling anyone who'll listen about how my Om tattoo is one of the very, very last illegal tats in America.

7. One of your Google ads right now is "Asian Girls for Love &  Marriage" that has photos, age, weight, and height of Asian girls I  guess I might want to marry if I were in to chick and, you know, in to  that whole mail order bride thing.  Do you really make enough money  off of the google ads to make it worth potentially offending your  readers?

   Nah, but with the things I talk about on my blog, I figure people are going to be offended no matter what. I've literally earned about $5 since I started running Google ads in November. I get a fair amount of e-mails from people who get up in arms about what I write about, so if they're offended by ad content over which I have no control, I figure what the hell.

8. Can you make anything else out of paper besides a ball?

   I can make tiny boxes, and I'm trying to learn how to make cranes, but it's really, really hard. The paper balls came about because I bought an origami kit. I was flipping through the book that came with it and all the "easy" stuff was boring - it was like, "You can make a cow's head!" It all sucked. The cranes, the boxes, and the balls were the "hard" ones at the back, and they were much more exciting. If you like I'll make you some origami balls and send them to you! [Ed note:  I don't just like, I demand.]  It helps that I'm a naturally fidgety person, and I like to do things like origami while watching T.V. or waiting for something to finish baking.

9. No one likes an overachiever.  Did you really read 42 books last year?

   I did, in the most liberal of senses. A fair number of the books I consumed last year were audiobooks, and a few more were books I'd already read. But I do love, love, love to read. I'm struggling through Michael Chabon's "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" right now, and it's really hard because I sorta hate everything about it, but some cosmic force compels me to finish books that I start, even if I hate them. Also, I should point out that seven of the 42 books I read last year were Harry Potter books, and I read the entire series in the month leading up the release of "Deathly Hallows."

10. Tell us about the first time you ever got paid to write something. Bonus points for including the link if it is available.

    In high school I won a couple writing contests that came with cash prizes. One was from the American Jewish Federation, but you didn't have to be Jewish to enter the contest, and I won a $300 scholarship from it. Then, at the end of the year, my high school had a program where they "presented" you with all the scholarships you were getting, and the principal - who hated me - made sure everyone knew that I'd entered this "Jewish" contest, even though I wasn't "Jewish." He totally made it sound like I'd defrauded the entire Jewish faith for a paltry $300, and I got a lot of disapproving looks from my peers and their parents.

    I guess technically the first ever professional paycheck I ever received was when I ended my internship at Oklahoma's main alternative newsweekly. Technically I'm still a freelance writer for them, but I haven't had time to write for them in almost a year. I got paid ten cents a word, my first paycheck was for $75, and I still have a photograph of it.

Coming up next, at some point, I'm to be interviewed by Elaine.

Comments

[Nichole]

That was a terrific interview. I love your first question, and Nathan's answer was so honest and true. Thanks for sharing!