It's snowing! Again! It's like I don't live in Arizona anymore!

...

If you ever post

"Bored :("

as your status on anything, you're automatically out of my dating pool.
Also, I think the species would be better off if your sexybits were irradiated and then set on fire.
(I'm speaking generally here, of course. I just like second person.)

Theme songs that make me feel good:

Degrassi, good.
Clarissa Explains It All, gooder.
Space Cases, absolute goodest.

I've discovered that this guy who I've talked to for years, who I was involved with at one point, who I had a mad crush on for a while and fell in love with for a while (...) has become a bored, disillusioned cubicle worker and gained quite a bit of weight. Also, he's turned into an obsessive Facebook poster because of said boredness at work.

And, again, a dammit moment. Silence for our dearly departed, please.

Oh, yeah, Happy Christmas! I'm listening to my new Garbage CD with my new earphones. I Love The Nineties™!

Yesterday, good!

Picked up my final term check from the college, stopped in to see Barbara. Talking with her always cheers me up, even when I'm not even slightly down. Went to the bank, talked with the nice lady who may or may not remember who I am? She knew my name, anyway, but it's on my account.... She gave me a candy cane! Failed miserably at finding a thrift store ugly sweater but got overpriced Christmas M&Ms, went back to my place with Alex to make cookies (he played Rock Band, mostly, but, hey, songs needed unlocking). Made Christmas cookies until Sarah came over, spent the rest of that evening making her special enchiladas (and doing laundry) until it was time to change. Went to get ready, was faced with a relative onslaught of on-time people. A very nice group, all things considered - both Sarahs, Alex, Jenny, Adrienne, Kellie, Delano, Beth, Jessica. There was Rock Band, there was Taboo, there was dance, there was alcohol. Oh, yes, there was alcohol. I don't feel so hung over, but my mouth is ridiculously dry. Stupid polar bonds.

Oh, and Barbara said, "You're going to be a wonderful physician." Warm fuzzies!

It's Christmas Eve-Day! ...the Day of Christmas Eve? Christmas Eve: The Day? Whatever.

Things Other People Like Which I Would Like To Understand & Like In Turn:
(*) David Bowie

Things Other People Like Which I Do Not Understand In The Least & Do Not Care To:
(*) Lady Gaga
(*) Mormonism

Gay Apgar / GCS

Apgar and GCS are both medical scales. Learn more? Click on them. After I had a rather disappointing date yesterday, here's my version of such a scale, named the RGM (the Representative Gay Male):

Continue?

Criterion	Score of 0	Score of 1	Score of 2	Score of 3
Musical Knowledge	No interest	May have some Disney and/or showtunes on mix CDs	Lives for Wicked or Rent	Names pets and/or nieces/nephews after characters from Wicked or Rent
Animal Ownership	Owns a cat	Owns several cats	Owns a dog	Owns one or more small dogs best described as "puntable"
Throws	No idea what one is	"It's like a blanket, right?"	Owns a throw	Owns one or more throws, color coordinates them with furniture
Lady Gaga	Induces vomiting	Claims to dislike, listens to on radio	Buys CDs/pirates music	Exarch in Church of Gagism
Job	Sciences, math, outdoor work, "anything straight"	Food service	Anything in the arts or fashion	Psychology, ass piracy, Madonna's backup dancers, professional diving
Expression of Income Level	Goodwill VIP card	Goes to fashionable places to laugh at fashionable people	Gated community	Gated community, complains of being poor when browsing HD bigscreen TV from leather couch
Drink	Soda	Water	Coffee or tea	Coffee or tea in Starbucks-style cup (3 points only if doesn't work at Starbucks)
Alcoholic Drink	Any liquor, from bourbon to vodka	Good beer	Wine, any kind or color	Mixed drink (score varies directly with alcohol content and boldness of color of drink)
Hair	Eh, whatever	Gels for special occasions	Cut or styled professionally once a month or more	On days when the dress doesn't get any fancier than t-shirt and soccer shorts, gels hair to perfection
Dance?	No	Get me drunk first!	Get me drunk first! And then my clothes come off!	is my life
Drugs	Maybe alcohol, maybe tobacco, maybe nothing	Pot	Crack	Crack and then some
Gettin' Gussied Up	Jeans are pants, and thus acceptably dressy items	Oh, you know, for special occasions	I have specific pants, vests, shirts, etc.	I have a specific dress

SNOWSTORM THREE DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS! DUDE YEAHHHHHHHHH

Peter Jackson's a pretty smart guy.

Also, consider this: Ten years ago, in 1999, four of the five top TV shows were fiction (and ER was number one!). The remaining slot? 60 Minutes. In 2009, four of the five top TV shows are American Idol (night one and night two) and Dancing With the Stars. The remaining slot? Monday Night Football.

C'mon, folks. We can all do with some more stories in our lives. Let's get things together, hm?

I'm terrible at keeping this going consistently.

Also, I kinda like having school in my life. Just gonna point that out.
(*Will punch past self in probably about four or five weeks.)

So, Avatar.

It was good, first. Mind-blowing and all that, at least the visuals. Story, meh: Could've been better, could've been a lot worse.

What I find most amusing is that in every review I read this morning, all the critics agreed that James Cameron was ham-handedly and unsubtly hammering down some kind of real-life correlative point. The Arizona Republic says it's obviously a reference to what's happening in Iraq. The Wall Street Journal says it's obviously a reference to the Vietnam War. I've seen African comparisons, I've seen aboriginal comparisons, I've seen Native American comparisons. So, all in all, Mr. Cameron, congratulations: You've allied your critics on a central point that none of them can really agree on.

But, really, it was good. I just wish the actual quality of the storytelling had matched the creation of the world.

Things I'm currently happy about:

(*) Straight science As! Including, like, the only A in my chemistry class.
(*) Going to see the new Avatar tonight at midnight with Amanda and Jenny!
(*) New Rock Band 2! With awesome musics.
(*) New awesome music in general, thanks to Pandora. The joys of U2 and Coldplay have been opened to me.
(*) The webcomic has finally begun!
(*) Two attractive guys are speaking to me, including one who, through some weird twist of fate, was both a stripper and dated the former student president of my college (the one who was a model) a while ago. I feel weirdly blessed?
(*) Letters from Dayna! Those made me quite tingly in the downstairs. And also more secure in what I'm doing (sorry, my dear, if that reads as disparaging what you're doing - not intended to, but I am glad now I didn't go that way).
(*) Life in general. The wine I just drank may have something to do with this.
(*) U2. Just U2.

In the tutoring center, I triage: When it's busy, when about eighty people need attention, I have to account for what they need help with, how much time they have, how difficult the problems are, how many of them there are, etc etc etc. I try to do it impartially, but....

If you're pleasant and willing to work through it yourself (and so only ask questions when you're stuck), you get bonus points. I'd like to say that's as far as my biased-ness goes, but then I remembered last night, oh, yeah, if a cute guy comes in, well, there's where my attention goes.

I saw other people. I spent lots of time with other people. But I kept going back to sit next to the cute guy.

...Dammit, 'nads.

My first college biology course is complete. I ended with a 99%. When I turned my test in, my instructor told me that I should definitely go on into the sciences (be a scientist, he said) because I have "the touch." Massive AWWWWWWWs ensued inside my little emo chest.

Huxxah for correct predictions of take-home finals! Chembledore didn't cancel the practical, though - we're doing it tomorrow afternoon. Ah, well, can't win everything.

Bio final today. So what did I do last night? Baked banana bread. See, we have a potluck thing before the final because, really, that's just what my class is like. It'll probably be fairly difficult (the test, I mean) but I also can afford to miss a few as I'm currently carrying 100% in the class right now (award, please!).

Snow day!

...in the middle of finals week?

I was supposed to have a written exam and then a practical exam in my chem class tonight. Dunno what's happening there. My vote is that he (1) posts the written exam online and gives us a couple days to do it and (2) cancels the practical. But that's just my suggestion (dooooooo it.)

Crazy-ass storm, yo.
Shifting the hyphen one word to the right results in crazy ass-storm, which implies something about lots of sex? Or maybe that's just me?

Pandora: Reminding me that I like Seal since 2009.
The stations I've been listening to of late are Peter Gabriel, The Police, The Doors, and The Beach Boys. Somehow, U2 manages to sneak into each and every one of those stations. I'm tempted to create a station like, I don't know, the Jonas Brothers or something, just to see if there's some faulty Pandora algorithm. Ha, yeah, I don't hate myself that much, my friends! If I want to listen to the Jonas Brothers, I'll just go punch myself in the testicles.

The first science finals week begins! It helps that it's almost Christmas. It doesn't help that I'm really much more excited about the upcoming formal and my other parties. Oh, and we're in the middle of a winter(?) storm. I'm kinda hoping it'll be like that one in Flagstaff where it rains for a day and then turns to snow for three. Except I really don't want to miss anything, so maybe not. And by "really don't want to," I mean "really do want to but am unwilling to sacrifice things such as finals and good grades so I won't."

I got paid $20/hour for a special tutoring gig yesterday. And I have far too many science-based examinations in the coming week (five).

random block quote of the day:

"If he is in fact gay, it's exactly this kind of shit that prevents him from being 100% out to the public. That is why gay actors have to 'not talk about their personal lives,' because straight assholes think gay actors can only play gay roles! ... 'I wouldn't find him believable in a straight role' isn't cute. It's not just because you're a slash fan. It's homophobic and it sucks."

(from here)

Stolen Facebook conversation of the moment:

Status: is on the road.
Response 1: text confirms, she's in the air!
Response 2: On the road. In the air. What's next? Uuuunder the sea!

Why would the library have cause to install a giant plywood Christmas tree between the reference collection and me? I don't know, but it makes me incredibly happy. Plus, it has flashing lights!

There are totally only two weeks left of term left. This is Strange. It went Fast. I like Capitals.

But seriously, folks.

And I mean two weeks to the full extent of the day: I have my chemistry final on the morning of the 11th (that last Friday). And then my own formal party the day after. I'm not quite counting the days yet, but when things like gas chromatography stop peeking over my shoulder, I will be a happy lad.

Anyway, as of right now I have:

(*) Two biology exams and two chemistry exams left. In two weeks. Agility required.
(*) The cutest lab partner. I mean, like, ever. Hi, I am indeed twelve.
(*) Three Christmas parties planned, incl. one directly after my last final.
(*) to figure out where my Christmas tree is going to go. My desk may heading to the garage for the holidays.
(*) too many people to call. I promised I'd call them over Thanksgiving, and then didn't. School. I love it, I love them, but bullshitting on the phone doesn't win in this world of mine.
(*) to send poetry out again.
(*) to figure out how I'm either going to tutor a woman on the side in algebra these last two week or not.
(*) a study session to organize on Tuesday between chemistry lecture lab (till 12:15) and recitation/lab (starting at 6) that also lets me have at least two hours in between there. People are just going to have to learn on their own, dammit.
(*) a happy. It snowed today! A little, anyway.
(*) no alcohol. Well, that I own, anyway. Everything of mine is at Amanda's, following a great night two weeks ago. There were spoons. Not spooning, mind, but spoons, surrounding a rather drunk person, to the delight of the not-so-drunkies.
(*) to go to bed. No, really, I have to go to the computer lab in the morning and start manipulating the chromatography data that's looking over my shoulder. Le petit bastard.

This is my (stolen) thought of the day:
"When did we get so old that our friends started having legitimate children?"

This may be a sign that I'm returning to this. Don't expect politicism, though.

NBC doesn't know what they're doing.

Well, possibly (probably) none of the networks do. But Michael Crichton didn't write the ER pilot because he was trying to fill a niche or attract a certain demographic. It was well-written, the characters were interesting, and it all came together.

These new shows are going to fail. Don't say I didn't warn you.

I realized today that as much as I hate on Warcraft, I would probably play World of Hyrule.

My free time thanks you for not jumping on the bandwagon, Nintendo.

Babies

I'm friends with X, have been since high school. He was with me in the movie club, was a nice guy, was our (and the school's, pretty much) token black guy. Thought of him today, went to look him up, his Facebook tells me he's doing more than the normal nonsense. He's an intelligent guy still, posts stories from Time and smart shtuffs. Scrolling down. He's in a relationship. Click her name. No picture, no info, but her address is "NamesMama." Oh. Strange. Is X shacking up with a girl with a kid? Back to his profile. Scroll down. How did I miss all the messages congratulating him on his new baby daughter?

I remember when I came back from Antioch and I complained about people from high school treating me like I was still in high school. Moved past that, but somehow I still have in my head that other people haven't changed a lot since then. I would stand by this hypothesis: Since high school, the majority of the people I knew will not have dramatically shifted their worldviews. Fair? But somehow I equate ideology solely with change, and I forget about babies and marriage and all those things. Is my refusal to conceptualize such things a function of my gaiety? Are they just not on my radar because I'm excluded from them? When something like this happens, I feel a galaxy apart from the person. See, beforehand, I was going to send X a message asking how he was doing, etc etc etc. Now I'm not. Why not? Because my assumption is that his having a child and a girlfriend will comprise most of his lifesummary, and I don't really care because I can't have either of those things and I don't want to hear about them as I've been forced to sit through their knowledge of their existence, and my exclusions from such, for 22 years. Fair?

To summarize:
(1) Facebook ruins lives.
(2) Straight people, stop having babies.

My Gay Story 8

I was happy to be home for Christmas, or so I thought, just before my body rebelled and opened me up for a nasty week of flu and strep throat. My parents wanted to spend New Years in Mexico, and so I came, but I didn't talk to any of them, partly because I couldn't and partly because I was still sorting things out. At the same time, I was reeling with a term's worth of pent-up sexual frustration, and I turned again to the Internet. When we drove home, I stayed in the city with my car and went looking for the nicest guy I talked to.

He had a great house and a nice car. He had a friendly dog and a four-foot television. He had two stories and was going to install a jacuzzi on his balcony. He was twenty-two. I didn't know what the hell to think, and then he started massaging my crotch through my pants while we watched The Royal Tenenbaums.

(Aside: Yes, this was all as upper middle class twit as it sounds. Just roll with it.)

The disc skipped halfway through, and we retired to his bedroom. His bed, which I haven't mentioned yet, looked like, well, like I was afraid to touch it. Not only was it beautiful, it looked like he'd had a maid (or my grandmother) make it. He jumped in, and I followed, almost hesitantly. He was happy to do all of the work, and I remember just kind of laying there, not really knowing what to do back to him because I was too busy learning what it felt like when you did things right. This, then, was my first orgasm, and even though I was only 19 it was absolutely the same as when "Aquarius (Let the Sunshine In)" starts to play at the end of The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

But then I was quickly introduced to another new concept: Love 'em and leave 'em. He didn't throw me out, exactly, but we'd done what we came to do, and he said he had to get ready for that night, when he had a bunch of friends coming over. I was welcome to come back, of course. I didn't take him up on it, though, mainly because I felt ashamed. Again, don't ask me where the feeling comes from, but as I drove across the city, I kept thinking about how I could have spent those hours more productively, how I could've spent those hours writing, working on my "career," such as it was. I'd wasted time in having sex. It didn't matter how it felt; it was a just a bodily weakness.

I began at the state university a couple of weeks later. The university may have called our "suite" a "three-person," but I called them "liars" and our "suite" a "cupboard." Yeah, that's probably more quote pairs than you're every going to see in one sentence.... I had the top bunk and Michael had the bottom, while his current roommate, Adam, had the un-bunked twin at the foot of our beds. Add a desk into that bedroom, and a cockroach couldn't have moved about in there (although they certainly tried).

I was pretty depressed for the entire term. I tried going twice to the university's gay advocacy club, but I figured out quickly that it was nothing more than a lesbian hook-up organization, and I stopped going. Living with Michael was fine, but the only other friends I had that term were people I'd known in high school. They, in turn, had known me as chubby, quiet, and confused and, to my mind, they still treated me as such. It was infuriating, after my liberating experience at Antioch, to suddenly have to live like I was back in college. I tried going out a few times, looking for new friends and new people, but I'd transferred at the wrong time; this university was in a very snowy city, and the entire place was frozen between December and May. No one transferred in, and certainly not at semester; I would have to wait until the next fall to start over.

(Interruption: I kept a journal, and here's a rather representative paragraph [notice how I don't capitalize?]: "I walked out of my classes feeling completely apathetic. again. I don't know what I can do about that, either. everything just seems so pointless. granted, I wasn't doing a lot that had to do with writing at antioch, either, but I was learning new things, it was challenging, and I was enjoying myself. here...no. I'm sick of going to lectures and staring blankly at a power point presentation that I can download for myself after the class. I'm sick of being spoon-fed information at a rate so slow it makes CSPAN seem gladiatorial. more than anything, I'm sick of complaining. I'm sick of complaining because there's nothing else I can do. I'm sick of being depressed about it, too.")

But, in the midst of it all, my first relationship! Adam wasn't exactly the knockout that Michael had promised, but he was attractive; he was blond, which I liked; and he was eminently available, as we lived together. As excerpted again from my journal (LONG):
"last night, at about midnight... leigh [a friend from high school] had just left (we'd been playing n64). adam and I got on our respective computers and michael got on his. adam had gotten back on aim, and he was saying that by playing, he'd missed a call from his asian [a guy he liked]. well, I got this weird reckless daring thing, and I decided to fake message him. I got his aim name from facebook and started up with things like 'I'm stalking you' and 'I can see you'. he started to freak out (kind of), but michael came out and ruined it. well, not really ruined...I was about to tell him, anyway...but it really was quite amusing.
"the point: we started talking online and in person, having three different conversations: I was talking to adam, typing to adam, and typing to michael; adam was typing and talking to me and typing to michael; michael was typing to both of us and we were yelling random things at him.
"well, somewhere along the line I decide that this is the night that something is going to bloody well happen. michael decides to make it so, and starts typing back and forth to both of us. unbeknownst to us, he's also copying and pasting what we say into each other's chats.
"by this time, it's like two in the morning. michael decides that he's going to bed, leaving me and adam sitting there. neither of us are typing anymore ... we're just sitting there. I'm on the couch, and he's at his desk, which is perpendicular to the couch.
"so, we just sit there without saying anything for twenty minutes, avoiding looking at each other. as you might guess, that gets old fast, but I'm not sure what to do. finally, I just say (mentally) 'fuck it,' and look into his eyes, and he finally does the same. next step: I'm already leaning towards him on the back of the couch, but he leans onto the couch now too. next comes the slow touching: we gradually get closer, until I brush his arm with mine. I make some kind of hand gesture, meaning that I can put my hand down on his arm. he rests his hand on my arm. I make some other gesture, and my hand lands on the back of his neck. he starts stroking my arm; I start playing with his hair. we move closer, still half-lying down, until our faces are almost touching. I say something about 'no more awkwardness'; he agrees. when I lift up my head again, he starts to kiss me. we make out on and off for a while, until about four.
"we're both unsure at this point if we want to bother getting up for morning classes, but we're also so tired we can barely see straight. we decide it's time for bed, and he tells me that I don't have to sleep alone. I get ready for bed whilst he gets in bed, and then I join him. verrrrrrry nice. no, I didn't sleep with him...I just slept with him. got it?
"the best thing he did: I was lying on his chest, and he bent over and kissed the top of my head.
"I don't want to be premature, but I think we're together. we kept hugging really tightly, as in 'I'll never let go, rose' tightly. he likes me, I like him. we held hands this morning while he was typing, before he went to class.
"...more as it happens. but at least we fucking got around to it."

...Yes, yes, I totally put a Titanic reference in there. I was an awesome kid, what other explanation is there?

Adam was a beginning. It was nice to have someone to sleep against for a few months, even though his twin bed got really small really fast; it was nice to kiss someone goodbye before class; it was nice to have a living situation that, granted, was tiny, but was with my best friend and my boyfriend. Too bad it was too good to last.

This is the last journal post, and it's near the end of the relationship:

"so, this relationship thing is kinda old. I'm tired of it. not in an 'end it' kind of way, but in an 'isn't there more?' kind of way. no, we haven't had sex yet. no, I don't really want to. we do everything up to (but not including) sex, but I don't want to go any further ... and I don't really want to continue the physicality that's going on now. this is not really my thing, see. I've been trying to figure this out...
"I realized I was never attracted to him physically. well, not *never* ... I was a bit at first, but only a bit. and now that that's worn off, I don't really even want to kiss him anymore, much less do anything sexual. it's almost a chore.
"I was attracted to him mentally. *was*. am not really anymore. it was cool that we liked a lot of the same things, but that's not really enough anymore, and I'm not really sure it was much to begin with.
"here's the other thing...
"I think it was a kind of challenge I set myself. I knew about him before I moved in, thanks to michael (and michael's facebook), so I knew he was bi. I wanted to see, if by living with someone who I knew I could get to like me, he would. well, it worked, and I proved my point, but now the newness has worn off. I hate to say that, because it sounds like a maturity thing, and maybe it is. ...it also sounds like I used him for my own ends, and I don't like to think that I did. after all, I *did* like him for a while, but it's coming to an end now. that's part of the reason I don't want to have sex with him, especially not now - that *would* be using him."

My first term at the state university ended at the same time my first relationship did. I went home again.

Oh, man, I'm thwarted

That title's courtesy of my chemistry professor. I haven't mentioned him yet, have I? How can I best describe him.... Ah, yes: Michael Gambon, playing Dumbledore. You know that little beard ring that Gambon wears when he's playing Dumbly? Well, cut off the beard there, make him bald-ish, and that's my chemistry professor. I mean, right down to the way he wears his half-moon glasses, and the bags under his eyes. He even has the same intonations, and moves about the room with the same energy. Incidentally, he's a nice guy but extremely intimidating, and there's really no choice but to call him "Professor."

My friend Emma pointed out that Snape taught Potions, not Dumbledore, but as far as the dispositions are concerned, I'd much rather have Dumbly.

So this is something like the beginning of week five (I've already lost track). The big deal is that the first exams in all my classes are this week. Now, it's been years since I've had science exams and, as I mostly took non-testable classes, years since I've had an actual sit-down comprehensive exam. I'm a little nervous, but I also have a whiteboard in front of me upon which I drew, earlier this evening, glucose, maltose, alpha 1,4 linkages, amylose, amylopectin, alpha 1,6 linkages, fatty acid, triglycerides (saturated and unsaturated), a phospolipid, a steroid, a theoretical and a natural amino acid, a description of peptide bonds, a ribose nucleotide with a purine, and a 2 prime deoxyribose with a pyrimidine. From memory. BE IMPRESSED. I'm not too nervous, but we haven't had any quizzes or exams yet in that biology class and so I have no idea what the testing style will be like. In Dumbledore's chemistry, we've had three quizzes already, so I'm not as concerned. Still, why does it always seem that tests fall in the same week, and sometimes even on the same day? Well, probably for the same reason that TV shows have ads at relatively the same times: Most shows are structured in the same teaser-act 1-act 2-act 3-etc model, so they take their breaks at roughly the same times. Classes, too, especially science and math classes, probably operate under similar structures, and so have major exams (if they're over about the same number of chapters, as these are) at relatively the same times.

Whew. A lot of qualifiers. And it doesn't really make me feel better, but there it is.

Apparently H1N1 was reported at my school. Since this is months after the big panic when everyone and their grandmother was reporting it in their backyards, I'm inclined to believe it. Sucks, though. I don't want to get sick, especially since I've been fighting some hybrid allergy-cold thing since Friday morning, and as much as I'd rather not even have this over the next couple of days, I'd like to fall to influenza even less.

I think I mentioned I'm doing some kind of weird tutor-teaching on the side? I met with the deans of the math and English departments last week, so that they could "assess my suitability" (my phrase). The math guy was nice; he ate sunflowers all through the interview, which basically boiled down to "Can you teach basic addition? Can you teach pre-calculus? Can you use a graphing calculator? Cool. Nice to meet you." The English dean, on the other hand, was a lot more verbose, and we actually got to talking for a while. I found out that she was 38 before she went back and got her Master's, and now she's a department head. Coming out of that meeting, I had a major, major ideological crisis that basically consisted of "Jesus, I just gave up a Master's, WHAT THE FUCK AM I DOING." But then the more me parts of me came in and said, yeah, it's cool, but what did she do until she was 38? What did she do between the age of 38 and when she took her current position? See, I wanted to be a professional writer, no holds barred, for the payoff; but I want to be a doctor for the journey. Too Hallmarky? Maybe. Still, I like writing along this path a lot more than I did when I was an English major. I'm still proud of my degree, by the way.

I hung out with the group of gays last weekend, but ... ah, more of that later.

My Gay Story 7

Antioch. Where to start?

My parents cried, in the airport. I wouldn't let them fly with me; I insisted on doing it alone. Not the best idea, as it turned out, because at the end of the day of flying I was not happy with even a small amount of ineptitude, and the supposedly free shuttle service line was disconnected. I considered not staying, just buying a ticket back to the west, which seems strange now that I think about it - I wasn't even going to give it a chance - but I was panicked. I mean, really, panicked, a couple of neurons from hyperventilating, just thinking, why did I do this, why did I do this, why did I do this? I think the only way I slept, that first night, was because my body was just so exhausted that it didn't care what my mind was thinking.

My rideshare the next morning knew how to help. Oh, I didn't tell her I was panicking or anything, but she knew what to say and what to show - look, Ohio highway construction is just as bad as Arizona - and her radio was playing Supertramp's "The Logical Song." Somewhere between the hotel's soggy muffins and the first misty morning at Antioch, I decided I was going to try.

I went to the gym. I met the people I'd talked to on the phone. I received my key, my orientation pocket, and my Antioch muffin, which was slightly less damp. I had my picture taken in front of a shower curtain (yellow with blue flowers) for my school ID. I set off across campus, wheeling my thumping trunk behind me.

The next few days were even better, because I met people - people who, in those few days, would set the groundwork for lifelong friendships. And, inevitably, I met a cute boy. It must've been my second or third day there, because my dorm, the transfer dorm, was having a meet and greet in our common room, and I ended up standing next to him.

He doesn't need a code name, because he already has one: Blueberry. Four reasons: First, my friend Veronica (who was also my RA) had a crush on Blueberry's (straight) roommate, and decided that he should be called Grape for no reason at all. The "nickname cute boys after fruits!" idea stuck, and thus, Blueberry. But I picked Blueberry for other reasons, too: He had startlingly blue eyes; he wore this wonderful sky blue shirt with regularity; and I loved to eat blueberries. ...Don't look at me like that.

Antioch's writing professor was on leave that fall term, so I decided that I was going to take the kinds of classes I always said I wanted to take, but never did. I signed up for a dance class, which was both movement (on Mondays and Wednesdays) and history (on Fridays). There was a visiting professor from NYU's drama school, and I signed up for her theater class, not knowing if I was any good but figuring, well, now was the time to figure it out; I tried out for performance and ended up writing part of it, too. I signed up for the choir because I liked to sing in my car. I signed up for a Queer Theory class that had a lot of reading. I signed up for a self defense class and a martial arts class. I was the epitome of those things you think about late at night before you fall asleep and the things you see on TV and say, geez, I wish they had that here. I wish I could do that. Maybe I didn't go on to win an Academy Award, exactly, but I had fun.

During my first dance class, we were sorted into groups for an ongoing exercise that was supposed to teach us how to move across a room. I somehow got chosen to lead one of the groups (I'd discovered Dance Dance Revolution that summer, and I can only think that that had something to do with it). Just as we're about to start waltzing across the studio, who should come wandering in but Blueberry? Where would he sit? Well, right in front of my line, of course. I caught up with him in the bathroom that night, and stumble-apologized for looking like such an idiot (Blueberry, of course, was in the advanced dance class that met after mine). "I thought you looked great," he said. I went back to my room and pounded my head into the wall for fifteen minutes.

See, I had no idea how to act around a cute gay guy. You've already read about my stumbling half-effort with Rachel, and the pseduo-sex with the Cowboy. I had no high school relationship sandbox in which to experiment. I had no idea what I was supposed to do to impress a guy like Blueberry, who was a kickass dancer, a smart guy all around, and who had grown up in the city. As I asked Veronica, what am I supposed to do, invite him down to the Caf? Antioch was in a small town, and yes, they had restaurants, but I hadn't even been on a proper date by that point and I was absolutely out to sea.

I only had a roommate for about a month. Karen (Antioch believed in co-ed rooming) decided around that time that she needed to be closer to her business and her family - she lived a day's car drive away - and so she withdrew. However, before she could go, she left me a little present. She was tired of hearing me talk about Blueberry, tired of seeing me crush on him without doing anything about it. Both Karen and Blueberry had joined my intro dance class by that point, and one day after class Karen held back and told Blueberry in no uncertain terms that I was pretty much in love with him.

Sounds like high school, doesn't it? That's certainly the emotional-readiness level I was at, but I don't know what her excuse was.... I was devastated, anyway. I couldn't talk to Blueberry for a week, and even then it was horribly awkward, especially since he didn't like me back. All those weeks of coy looks! The nights spent chatting up while we brushed our teeth! All those dance classes of dancing myself hoarse for him! I would've gotten to asking him, in my own time. But now, no chance.

Antioch, for all its gay-friendliness, didn't attract many gay men. In the three floors of my dorm building, Blueberry and I were the only gay guys. Lesbians, on the other hand, were out in full force. Of course, the joke (read: the motto) at Antioch was "Hi, I go to Antioch, and it takes fifteen minutes to explain my sexuality." I was impatient with that. I was a gay man! I knew what I was, I knew that I liked men, and that was that. But with Blueberry unavailable, I didn't have much else to turn to. There were a few girls who "identified as men," and more power to them, but I wasn't about to go out with them.

My friends, though, there's another story. Many of them fell under the fifteen-minute sexuality banner, and they were all (with the exception of Grape, who did eventually get together with Veronica) women. We were some kind of liberal arts sitcom, really: The East Coast Jewish girl. The kitschy photographer. The redhead with glasses. The never-showers artist. The café-haven indie guitarist. The lesbian writer. And me. I loved 'em all, and I fill up many entries with memories and inside jokes and whatnot, but it'd all have to be contained within that single fall semester.

See, at the same time Antioch was a rousing success, it was also a failure. Notice came down from the governing board that term that they were going to close the college in a year and a half, and while that wasn't solely responsible for my decision to leave, it was pretty sobering to realize that I couldn't get a degree from Antioch, no matter how hard I worked, because it would close down before it was feasible. Then, too, they took away some of my financial aid because of a mistake in which my dad, who had identified himself (rightly) as a student because he was in the process of getting his master's degree, was accused of making up another child in order to get more financial aid for me. Apparently it never occurred to them that he could be both a parent and a student, or that they should clarify such things on their applications, but whatever. I digress. It still rankles, but this isn't what this is about.

I made up my mind too quickly, probably. By October, I was already filling out applications for transferring the next term. Well, "application," actually, as I'd already made up my mind that I was going to head back to an Arizona university. I was talking almost daily with Michael (my high school best friend, remember him?) by this point, and he told me I should just move into his dorm room, which was supposed to fit three, even if they'd never bothered finding him a third roommate. Perfect! He came out to me around that time, too, not as gay, but as transgender. I tried to be supportive, but I was having enough problems just figuring life out for myself.

I can't say it was bittersweet to leave, because it wasn't sweet. Looking back now, and knowing what's coming, I wish I'd stayed at Antioch, if not until it closed, then at least until the summer. Yeah, it was expensive, and yeah, I'd run out of boys to potentially go out with, but that could've changed the next semester! If I hadn't already announced that I intended to leave at the end of semester, the pool party (ahem, naked pool party) we threw the week before school ended should've convinced me otherwise. But I thought about getting my program back on track; I thought about a whole city full of potentially gay men; I thought about Michael's roommate, who he assured me was attractive and bisexual.

I flew home for Christmas and I didn't come back.

Eight feet of DNA in every cell!

I like that. Sounds like a DNA advert, doesn't it? Or an ad for cells, anyway: "Over eight feet of DNA in our cells, compared to our competitor's six!" Okay, so that doesn't sound like an advert at all, but whatever. There's a reason I don't work retail. Actually, funny story about working retail. Well, not so funny....

My first job-job (as in, something other than babysitting or cleaning the houses of relatives) was working as a cashier at Sears. Actually, the official name was "CAC," which stood for "Central Aisle Cashier" but which was, of course, corrupted from "CAC" into "cock" within fifteen minutes by the guys I worked with.

Anyway, I was a sixteen-year-old cock at Sears, working mainly in the tool department. The sex jokes pretty much stopped there, but my friends found it massively amusing that I worked around tools, let me tell you. I also crushed on a few of my coworkers, including one guy I went to high school with who worked in Lawn & Garden and ended up being Gay™ a few years later. I remember getting on the loudspeaker a few times, especially when I was alone at the register with no floor people in sight and an old man would come up and ask me something about god-knows-what kind of wrench. Well, Sears is a joyous corporation determined to preserve its glorious heritage among its minimum-wage employees, and my (paid) training included several days learning about the history of the Sears corporation but no actual useful knowledge regarding, say, how to distinguish a wrench from a hacksaw. So, more often than not, I would send myself onto the store's loudspeaker: "Matt. Chris. Eric. Anyone. Please help, before I fuck something up and sell this old guy a pair of penny loafers instead of a sledgehammer." Hell, the old guy probably never knew any better, either.

The fucked-up part, the reason I never want to work corporation retail again, was the Sears card. Of each and every customer, I was supposed to ask "Would you like to put this on your Sears card?" If they said no, I was then supposed to ask "Do you have a Sears card with us?" If they said no again, then came the "Would you like to apply for one? It only takes about three minutes." I was supposed to ask, mind, but I never actually did unless the head cock was standing around (which she almost never did; she was a relatively cool girl in her mid-twenties, and I got the feeling she didn't like it either). The irritating parts for me were twofold - first, when I had to ask, I very nearly always got turned down, and I don't do well with rejection. Second, the people who said "yes" were also invariably the people who had rifled through their wallets or purses for twenty minutes, searching for the one card they hadn't maxed out, then asked me to swipe it, remembering just in time that they'd actually handed me an expired Fry's VIP card. Plus, the interest rate was sky-high. I worked there for about five months and I think I signed up about a dozen people for Sears cards. May the gods have mercy on my already tattered soul.

Jesus, these posts are like riding in the car with my brother. See, he believes that driving should take your breath away ... and, if possible, your life, just to let you know that you've really been enjoying yourself. Somewhere in the past six years, Driver's Education has apparently amended its curriculum so that green no longer means "go" and red means "stop." Instead, green now means "go" and red means "go HARDER. Horns? What horns? They're just cheering you on!" Bumpers are designed to touch, brakes are suggestions, and screamo is God's gift to the world of music. ... Eventually, he does get me (and himself, I guess) home safely, so let's move right along.

Books. They're great. Read them. Don't know what to pick up? Lucky you, I'm here to help.

First off, Alas, Babylon. What if the Cold War had been warmer and more of a war? Specifically, what if the Soviet Union had nuked all the US coastal cities and most of Europe to radioactive hell and back, and then been counter-wiped out itself? It's an interesting proposition, but what I really liked about it is that it didn't jump for the blockbuster ideology of "a group of determined and ethnically-sensitive (but still mostly white) survivors claw their way through the ruins of Great City X." Instead, the main characters are all from a small town in Florida, and the only time they leave is when the main visits his brother before the bombings happen. If you've read The Road, I'd compare it to that, and not necessarily in terms of related subject matter, either. Rather, while you get apocalyptic cataclysms in both books, they're more about the emotions of survival and recovery and what-have-you. And shit blows up, so give it a shot.

A Girl from Yamhill and My Own Two Feet. Generally, I'm not a big fan of memoirs, but Beverly Cleary occupies a very special place in my heart. And if one more person asks me who Beverly Cleary is, I'm going to clobber them. Henry Huggins and Ribsy? Ramona and Beezus Quimby? Leigh Botts of Dear Mr. Henshaw? The Mouse and the Motorcycle? If you can honestly tell me none of those ring any sort of bell, then I say right now that you had an incomplete childhood. Go out, right now, and get one Beverly Cleary book, and then read her memoirs.

What I found so interesting about Beverly Cleary's life, especially her college years, is that I could read some parts and say, hey, yeah, this totally happened to me, too! Then, other parts seemed less like she'd grown up in a different time and more like she'd grown up on a different planet. (She was through college before World War II began.) If nothing else, they're absolutely worth the descriptions of her young adult life. But, really, she's a great writer (probably one of the best of the century, if not ever), so check 'em out.

Boy Culture. When I saw this book at the library, I just read the dust jacket - gay male prostitute spills his life - and that was enough to make me put it in my bag. Later, I wasn't so sure; it seemed a bit too much like an edgy gay sitcom: Gay prostitute has wacky gay roommates who get into lots of rowdy adventures! Some of it does come across as a little trite, like the "my roommate's gay, NO REALLY, and I have a crush on him so let's get him out of the closet" (and maybe that's just because I've lived it, natch). On the whole, though, it's a lot like Shortbus (which is awesome. See it.) in that, yeah, the characters are gay, and they're more, ahem, sexually liberated than you're likely to see in the latest Dan Brown or Nora Roberts, but that doesn't mean the book sacrifices any humanity in the telling.

No excuses now, kids. Your library's there for a reason, and it's free. Use it. Go.

My Story (The Gay Years), Part 6

Spring of my freshman year. I was gay; I'd had "sex" with a man. It was time to improve myself.

Improvement had several faces. First, I ignored the nonsense about "getting an associate's degree" and signed up for as many writing classes as I could. Second, I started (well, continued) to look for schools to transfer to. Third, I started riding my dad's old exercise bike.

One of my friends from the Dream Interpretation class, Weshaw, ended up in one of my writing classes. It was nice to have a friend again, let me tell you, especially since Jennie left that January for her new school. The writing classes were, like the Dream Interpretation class, safe spaces, although I mostly wrote silly poetry and science fiction back then. I got the idea, though, that if I were ever to write about gay characters, it would've been okay.

I was reading a book at the time called The Book of Dead Birds. I was quite surprised to find a dedication to my writing teacher inside; apparently, she and the author had gone to grad school together at a place called Antioch. I was researching a lot of small schools back then - small schools that were reportedly gay-friendly, that cared about each of their students, that had good writing programs, that were (hopefully) far from my small town. From that list, I short-listed my three favorites - Sarah Lawrence, in New York; Grinnell, in Iowa; and Antioch, in Ohio.

(Relevant aside: I applied and was accepted to the latter two, but I didn't even apply to Sarah Lawrence. Years later [as in, this past spring], I applied and was accepted to their grad program. I declined, to begin my medical studies. But in one of my entrance essays, I wrote about this period: "All of my potential [schools] were small, all of them liberal and easterly, all potentially snowy and definitely far from the west. Sarah Lawrence sent me a book-size pamphlet, and I carried that thing around with me like I was a closet alcoholic and it was my flask. I'd whip it out at school, at work, waiting for a movie to start, look at the treeful pictures and remind myself that there was something more than what I'd seen." It was pretty true. And "treeful" is a cool word.)

I chose Antioch. It was, at last, something to work towards, something I'd chosen, consciously, with my eye wide open, as opposed to the obvious filtration from state high school into state university. I liked what I'd chosen. I packed three months early. I was ready to be fully gay, in a place where it was okay.

But I skip ahead. It's worth mentioning the one way I was fully gay in my town, too: the community college's GLBT club. It was, simply, "the GLBT club," and we met once a week, Friday afternoons, in a secluded classroom. The group was a small one, and included several older women, including the club's sponsor, and Drew, the club president. He was a year older than me, and he was cute in a "I wear glasses to make me look good" kind of way. I've never really cared for that whole show myself, but Harriet the spy did it too, I guess.... But Harriet did it to look smart, not to "fill out her face" (whatever that means). Anyway, digressing, so: He was nice, and he had a boyfriend who lasted just until the end of the term and made him unavailable until I left.

It wasn't a bad club, as far as my one hour per week of being fully gay went. I remember one particular night, before World AIDS Day, when we all met at Drew's apartment to prepare. Specifically, we sat down and watched the pilot episodes of The L Word and Queer as Folk while we stuffed condoms, instructions, and spearmint LifeSavers into little baggies. It was fun. I was jealous, because Drew's boyfriend was there, and they'd kiss whenever Drew got up to go to the kitchen or something. Well, "jealous" doesn't even really cover it, because I was just as fascinated. I had never seen gay people in real life acting as though they were perfectly normal in their affection. I was impressed, and as much as I immediately crushed on both of them (they were gay, they were my age, they were unavailable; it was obvious), I was upset when I heard that they'd broken up. I wanted them to stay together, maybe more for my illusions than for their emotions.

The summer seemed like a last hurrah. I'd dropped from a 38/40 waistline to a 28/30, and lost over thirty pounds. I was happy, for the first time, with how I looked (though I do remember experimenting with self-tanner, to some rather unfortunately orange results). At work, during my last week, I got cards from all my friends, and the biggest surprise of all - from the owner, another card, an $100 bill, and a free going-away party for me and my friends. Obviously I wasn't as much a "weirdo" as I'd assumed! I gave her the only hug of our entire relationship, and looked toward a new beginning.

Step outside the bubble

Every so often, you'll find a nutjob who honestly believes that, I don't know, goldfish are evil. Or, say, homosexuality invading family life through popular music, which is what this entry's about.

(Aside: The name of the site I just linked you to is called "God Hates Fags," so watch yourself.)

Really, though, the site is so laughable that it's hardly worth disclaiming. These are the type of folks who Capitalize Random Words to better drive home their Point. Either that, or they never made it through the third grade.

I want to paraphrase this, but really? How can you get better than this: "Some bands are what we like to call Gateway Bands. They lure children in with Pop Grooves and Salacious Melodies leaving them wanting more. They’ll move on to more dangerous bands and the next thing you know you’ve got a homosexual for a child."

OH NO. A Homosexual for a Child. OF ALL THINGS.

They list "gay" bands for the crazies concerned parents who want to keep their Children from becoming Homosexuals. The list is the major reason why this site is funny as opposed to a 'net hemorrhoid, because they list parenthetical reasons with some of their choices. Major highlights:
*Pink is unacceptable because she evidently has a "gay family."
*Toby Keith is a "cowboy." Seriously. That's the reason. Apparently Brokeback homo'd everyone west of the Mississippi.
*Kate Bush. "Kissed a girl." Apparently they feel they don't need to expand there. Actually, neither do I.
*The Butchies. I didn't even know they were a band, but apparently they're also "lizbians." Not "lesbians." Lizbians.
*Morrissey is "questionable." Personally, I hope he's more than, but whatever.
*George Michael is a "Texan." Evidently Texans are gay. Someone ought to tell our ex-president.
*Britney Spears kissed Madonna. Ergo, gay.
*Elton John is "really gay." I'm just not sure if this is meant as "Elton John is very gay" or "No, really, Elton John is gay." Oh, well, either way, one out of about six thousand isn't bad.

But wait! There's more! There's another list of wholesomely Christian, god-fearing, homo-abating bands! Why not jam with Jesus to Evanescence and Creed? It's Listening God's Way, folks! And, if the last list was laughable, this one is ridiculously cringeworthy simply because it's headlined by Cyndi Lauper.

This is the kind of photo that doesn't need a caption. ...Although I do want to know what the woman to the left is thinking.

My problem is that too many of my favorite bands aren't on either list. What about the penultimate boy bands (IMHO) The Beatles and The Beach Boys? They're boys getting together to make music ... that's gay, right? What about Queens of the Stone Age? They're all guys, but they call themselves queens! Franz Ferdinand? They have a song about lusting after a guy! Perhaps most disappointingly, I still don’t know whether Fleetwood Mac is safe or not. When I listen to them, will they "foster heterosexual desires and stimulate a Christian mode of thought"? Or will they encourage my deviant behavior and eventually result in my eternal damnation?

Only time will tell.

Life's Cycles

I'm cleaning my desk off when I find the tassel from my high school graduation. That's enough to remind me of a world away, but I don't think of high school or graduation when I see it.
I think of a date I had close to a year and a half ago now. The "date" took place mainly in my car, so make of that what you will, but early on he was looking through the glove compartment and he found the wadded-up tassel. I'd hung it around my mirror for a couple of months after high school graduation, but it came down not long afterward when I decided that I didn't want to remember high school anymore. ...Or, maybe I decided it was a driving distraction. One of the two.
Anyway, he unknotted it and hung it back around my mirror. He said something about being proud of what I'd done, the wholeness of life, the present coming from the past, something like that. Or maybe he didn't ask and didn't say anything. Maybe I'm just ascribing good things to him that he doesn't deserve. He was very nice, then, the kind of French-Asian that's a lot more full-faced French and only Asian around the eyes. Not so much later.
I took it down the time after I saw him last because it reminded me of him, not of high school. It's stayed in my backseat for a very long time now.

Explanation McShortypants

If a whole bunch of entries appear at once and the timestamps seem to be all over the place, don't worry about it. I write a lot of drafts during the week, look over them later, and publish them, but I prefer to have the timestamps correspond to when I first wrote the drafts. So, check back all the time, as you never know what you'll find and when you'll find it. (That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.)

What's wrong with expectations?

I pulled a nice book out of the library. When I Knew, ed. Robert Trachtenberg. A very easy read - a bunch of short essays (sometimes just paragraphs) dealing with, well, when folks knew. Self comings-out.

It has something like eighty, eight-five different stories, listed at the front of the book. Along with each contributor's name, the book gives their primary occupation. From those occupations:
-Nine contributors list their sole occupation as "comic." Apparently growing up gay is growing up in a slowly-ripening joke field. ...I don't know whether I'm being sarcastic there or not, but I did find it a little surprising.
-Fourteen contributors identify themselves as writers. Here, though, they're a lot more likely to double- or triple-occupy themselves; there's a "writer / actor / comedian" and "actor / writer / musician," among others.
-Eight identify themselves as "designers" - fashion, interior, production.
-Seventy (as in an order of magnitude greater than seven) contributors, the vast majority, identify themselves as working within the entertainment industry.

There are a few minority positions. Two of the contributors work in education, one in business, one is a former politician, and one is an attorney.

I'm trying to think of a way to sugarcoat it, but it's not coming. So: If I had gone to the gay section of the library, picked this book out, and sat down to read it and get a realistic (not relativistic) picture of gay people, I would have been disappointed. Crisis: Growing Up Gay in America is a much better anthology, I think, and I would recommend that to anyone who really wants to read what a variety of different experiences are like.

But I shouldn't be too hard on this book. I think it's largely a coffee table book (not about coffee tables, though ... reference, anyone?), and is patently and lightly fluffy in a way that will please any casual readers when they see "I knew I was gay when I outgrew my mother's high heels" or "My father was watching the evening news [in 1969]. The announcer said that Judy Garland had died. I fainted. I was nine." Cue reaction: "Oh, those silly homos!" Such would be my expectation.

The essay I enjoyed most was the attorney's. Excerpted: "While Judy and I spoke, Guy looked at me. He pushed the drawings around on the table. He paged through the brochure. At some point, he interrupted and said, 'You like this stuff? The dancing and the music? You'd rather be here at home by yourself instead of at the baseball field?' ... I said 'sure' or nodded my assent. But the look on his face - which I recall to this day - did me in; it was a mixture of bemusement, disapproval, and disgust. ... My mother found me sitting in the living room, curled up in a corner sofa. I told her I must have fallen asleep, though I hadn't. I'd been awake the whole time, thinking as only a child can, 'Why didn't he like me? What's wrong with me?'"

Maybe the truth of the matter is more in the armchair boy than the boy who experimented with high heels and eyeliner? Or maybe it's just my truth.

My Story (The Gay Years), Part 5

So I had a newly-acknowledged personal facet (yeah, try saying that five times fast). So what? It didn't matter unless I did something with it, right? And I'm not referring here to going out to buy rainbow stickers or finding a parade to march in. I mean to say SEX.

I was absolutely sure that I couldn't find anyone in my town, or even in the tri-city area. So, as I'd done before that week of university, I turned to the 'net. It seemed clear to me that even if I searched online, I'd only find horny old men, and that was certainly not what I wanted. So I lied, and said I was from Phoenix; when guys would message me for a while, I'd tell them the truth. I don't remember how many guys I talked to back then, but only one of them ever came to anything.

Call him Cowboy, because the first picture of him had him dressed up as such. The Goblet of Fire movie had just come out, and I thought that he looked a bit like Robert Pattinson (pre-Twilight sparkling douchebaggery). I was picture-smitten, and then we started calling each other in the dead of night, when my family was asleep and I could pace around downstairs, talking in a low voice. No, we didn't have phone sex. Yes, we did plan to see each other. I wasn't willing to drive down to meet him, but he was a routine camper who drove north every few weeks, and on his next drive he arranged to see me.

There was no pretending that both of us weren't thinking sex, even if the conversations were polite and open. I told him, honest and straight-up, that I had never orgasmed, and he made it his goal to coax it from me my first time.

Let's talk about the big O, shall we? I was afraid of it. You might attribute it to Catholic school and Catholic sex education, but I don't think that was it. For one, I can't remember the priests or nuns ever referring to masturbation or anything as "bad," although they did tell us we shouldn't have sex, like, ever. But I definitely had wet dreams, all through high school, and I was ashamed of them afterwards. I was afraid that I was wetting the bed, and that some part of me was reverting, de-aging, losing its discipline. I didn't make the connection, until I was in college, that I was having those dreams because I wasn't masturbating, and that my body needed what I wasn't giving it. But, just to clarify: By the age of eighteen, I had never brought myself a conscious orgasm. Why would I? What would I have thought of?

But now I was determined to make it happen. I brought the Cowboy to my house one rare day when I didn't have work or school, but when all of my family was gone (I think I was already on Christmas break, but my brothers weren't). We got naked fairly quickly, and the first time he tried to kiss me, I was afraid I'd made a terrible mistake. I grew up around horses, see, and I knew what they smelled like, especially their breath. He had been camping for a day already, and I gave him that inch, but I was too unsure of myself to offer him a toothbrush or even a mint. Perhaps I should've been more forthright; perhaps I would've enjoyed myself more.

I took him to my bed. He gave me a massage; we cuddled; we spooned. He was determined to make me orgasm, and to show me everything he could, so he did. Then, finally, he begged me to fuck him. As overweight as I felt I was back then, he was bigger; the "sex," as such it was, was awkward. He didn't give me an orgasm, and as I watched him, in a look of supposed ecstasy, I almost sighed: Maybe I had experience now, but this wasn't what I wanted or thought of when I thought "sex."

I drove him back to his car. We parted amicably, but I knew I wouldn't see him again. I didn't, but I'd accomplished my goal of starting my résumé. Had I been looking for love? Did I, at eighteen, believe that I could find it then and there? I don't know. I would like to say no, to spare you my naivete, but maybe I did. I say "résumé" now, but I wouldn't have slept with him without feeling that there would be feeling. There wasn't. I shouldn't have. I did.

The Cure, now with More Science™

At least, I'll try to add some more science.

The dangers of, if not a "potential" pill that could repress homosexuality, but a theoretical one, are twofold, the way I see it.

One, lack of understanding - i.e., "being gay is a choice" versus "being gay is genetic."
Two, genetic modification, Aryan-ism, and augmentation.

One, then.
The major trouble here is that homosexuality is still, I believe, not well understood. Too many people are too content to simply say, "Well, the Christian Bible declares it a sinful abomination. People keep themselves from murdering, don't they? Murder is an abomination, too. Why can't people keep from being gay?"
There are probably millions of counterarguments out there for this one, and it isn't my main point, so let me just say that that's a completely bogus way of looking at things, end.
To those people, though - not necessarily Christians, let me make plain, but anyone for whom being gay is supposedly a choice - the possibility of a pill to cure homosexuality is a viable thing. Well, why not? Many people still think, despite what the APA has ruled, that homosexuality is a disease; this itself is a belief system which has no merit or verifiable fact, but still it exists. Then again, the United States isn't necessarily known for its smooth logic - just look at Creationists. I refuse to even write "the Creation vs. Evolution debate" because there is no debate, in my mind, there's only ignorance versus fact. Similarly, I grant the belief that gaiety is a disorder no credence, but that way of thinking need to be mentioned because for such people there is something to be cured, and so a cure is viable. Too bad medicine, science, and fact get in the way, eh? So, my first point: There can be no cure because, medically, there is nothing to cure.

Two.
Suppose medicine were to discover whatever gene sequence(s) separate homosexual and heterosexual humans. What would you do with that?
On the one hand, how much could you get into debating the Hippocratic Oath? Isn't it definitively harmful to change a person so completely? There are a couple of different ways to look at this, too:
*Personal choice. If you, as an accountable adult for whatever reason, didn't want to be gay, and could go to your doctor (well, a specialist, anyway) and say, switch it off, that would be viable. I would find it fairly repugnant, but it could happen.
*Parents' choice. Suppose such a genetic sequence could be detected in utero. If parents didn't want their child to be gay, they could tell their doctors to simply modify the child. This is a frightening option for me because who knows how that would turn out? See, my parents are lovely liberal people who have known plenty of gay folks, but suppose they thought they would be doing me a favor by deactivating the gay sequence before I was born?
Simply put, I would not exist.
Someone else would, and I suppose this then become more of a hindsight problem because I would never know the me that I am, and likewise I would never know the straight version of me. Still, it's a rather scary thing to think about, because where does it stop? Theoretically, if your parents could manipulate the genes for sexuality, what else could they do? How far do we get into petri dish babies? Oh, I want a blond boy; oh, I don't want the kid to be as black as your father; oh, I would like to have a straight child. Dangerous territory. This, I think, is where the Hippocratic Oath should come in, even though I can see plenty of arguments against it.
*Someone else's choice. The largest possibility I see here is in ex-gay camps, which could profess to be completely ex-gay, were this gene sequence discovered. On the one hand, this could also fall under personal choice, but imagine a teenager who's been sent off to a real ex-gay camp. Surprise, now you're definitively straight! That, my friends, is a frightening idea.

Any way you look at it, it's a scary thing. I would like to end here with "and if they are looking for it, let the doctors spend their time searching for a cure to AIDS or something!" But I know that people who search for such disease cures and for gene sequences are very different types of scientists, so so much for that.

Kurt Vonnegut or Margaret Atwood or god-knows-who would probably have a field day with this idea, in fictional form. But, truly? The idea of being able to screw around with who you are, who you have been, or who you could become, at least on a genetic level, should remain firmly in the realm of fiction.

Once Upon a Time, in a Little Valley

AKA reports from my life. If you just want to hear me opine and rant and whatnot, skip.

My first week of doing out-and-out medical studies (or so I define them, anyway). Here's a nice, vaguely bulleted overview:

I learned how to titrate. What's this, you ask? Essentially, it's adding a solution drop by drop to another solution until you reach a desirable endpoint. In this case, I added hydrochloric acid to two dyed solutions (water and a buffer) to try to restore clarity and see which would absorb more. The buffer did, as expected.

What's a buffer, you ask? Well, consider this (paraphrased explanation): Soda is acidic, yes? So when you drink a soda, why doesn't your body's pH change palpably change (and why don't you die)? The answer's in the buffer - in the case of the body, bicarbonate ions, which bind with the hydrogen ions present in acids like soda to form carbonic acid, which can then be converted to water and carbon dioxide, which the body is quite adept at dealing with. Similarly, when the body takes in too much base, hydrogen ions are removed from the blood, so the body responds by dissociating carbonic acid (which, again, just comes from water and carbon dioxide) into hydrogen and bicarbonate ions. Cool, yeah? Nothing tells the body to do this, it just happens. The body: the best machine on the planet.

(Incidentally, if that explanation is too paraphrased or anything, correct me.)

Chemistry is a science and vocabulary unto itself. Example: significant figures. Sig figs are apparently also shared by physics, but this is the first time I've run into them. I understand them on a basic level, but they make no sense to me logically. This is where it gets me: Say you have two substances, 6.4 grams and 6.7 grams, and you want to multiply them together. The answer should be 42.88 grams, right? But according to the rules of significant figures, the answer should be 43 grams (or maybe 42.9, generously, and I'm still not sure), because 6.4 and 6.7 g each only have two significant figures. Being less accurate makes no logical sense to me, and even less so when you consider this: multiply 14.0 by 3 with the rules of significant figures. The answer? 40, because, it only has one significant figure (and the zero isn't, because it's trailing and uncertain). Lord, just let me report that damn decimals. Amen.

For all the latent Animorphs fans out there, my lab partner in biology is a black woman named Cassie, and I sat next to a tall, handsome guy named Jake my first day in chemistry. I'm taking this as a smiling sign, by the way. Would definitely like to talk to him again, incidentally. I also asked a cute guy, on my first day, how to use the sinks in the library bathroom (hey, it was counter-intuitive, all right, you had to physically push the faucet spigot up into itself. And if that sounds confusing, you should've seen the sink). I don't think I came off too intelligently. Then it turns out he's in my chemistry lecture, recitation, and lab.... He's also one of those guys with an utterly perpetual sneer, compounded by the fact that he's an utterly perfect physical specimen. Be still, my heaving and somewhat downtrodden chest.

I also had a pretty awesome Friday-night adventure with Michael that involved the best bar in town, drinking margaritas, buying underwear, singing along to the Chicago soundtrack, and breaking down in his car several miles from anywhere in the middle of the night, and hiking back singing Christmas carols. We are awesome.

I'm all for joining the tri-city area's GSA (see previous posts), and they're going to move meeting times to a "week 1 Tuesday, week 2 Thursday, week 3 Tuesday, week 4 Thursday" schedule, which means I can go half the time (my recitation/lab for chemistry is Tuesday night). The guy who runs it, Joey, is studying to be a space physicist; he's a smart guy, nice, accommodating. And he wears tight Star Trek t-shirts. It remains to be seen if he sings Christmas carols while hiking, though.

Such is the summary for now. Expect more as it unfolds.

My Story (The Gay Years), Part 4

I knew. Wasn't it time someone else did?

But it was a pretty precarious time. All my long-term friends - Rachel, Michael, other people I haven't pseudonymed yet - had left for college. I was left with a single friend, Jennie, a mediocre job, and a half-time school schedule. I was close to being fully depressed; I wore the same shirt every day, and only about two different pairs of pants; I would bring a pizza home from work and eat the entire thing myself. It was ... well, it was bad. Yet there were a couple of good things, things that made it redeemable.

The classes I signed up for were, for the most part, nothing too spectacular - Introductory Anthropology, Introductory Sociology - but I also enrolled in a class I knew I had to take: Dream Interpretation. Long story short, it got me through that first term. We had normal class activities - I learned more about Freud and Jung in that class than I did in a year of university psychology - but it was honestly more like a group therapy session every week, and that's just what I needed. The class was about what you'd expect from the community college crowd: there were a couple of folks my age; a couple of new moms who were just going back to school; a mother-daughter duo who were likewise heading back; a couple of older folks who thought the class looked interesting. It was a safe place, and that's what I needed then. My town is conservative in the way of retired WASPs, so to find such a safe space was almost miraculous.

It's important to establish that I had such a place, because work definitely wasn't. I'd thought, when I started, that a "wine café" was necessarily cosmopolitan and liberal. I was wrong. It was owned by an old couple from California. Well, ostensibly owned - he cooked, and she did all the owning, and let me just say that the term "battle-ax" was invented to describe this woman. She was not just aggressive, she wouldn't rest until you agreed with her, so there was really no choice but to nod and smile. She would not only defeat you when you disagreed, she would deny that you could disagree. Following any disagreement, she would steal your firstborn children, burn your buildings, and sow ash over your empty fields. Most importantly, she wouldn't even refer to gay people as "gay"; she called us "weirdos." Not that she knew I was gay, at least not until later.

Jennie and I were the only hosts who worked at the restaurant, and as it was open 11-10, we were there pretty much all the time. As far as coming out goes, I'd decided by October or so that Jennie was the logical first choice. I remember the night, too; I invited her over to watch a movie, and after my family had gone to bed, I told her that I was gay. Her reaction was a loud "Really?" It was a good thing, though, because she ... well, she hadn't been waiting for it, exactly, but her secondary reaction was "Oh, well, that makes sense," which I heard a lot of during subsequent comings-out. Of course, then came all the questions about what I had done (nothing), who I crushed on (specifically, our co-workers), and so forth. Even though my experience was nonexistent, I was happy. Someone knew.

But, now, who else? I needed more. I needed a net. I mentioned my gaiety in passing in my Dream Interpretation class, but no one really made a big thing of it. Why should they? People routinely had much stranger dreams; at least one person started crying every week. I was gay, that was a part of me, and while I can appreciate that now, it made me impatient back then. I needed people to ask me and make a big deal of it, not treat it was just a normal thing. So, I poked around at work.

The other restaurant workers were a notably more liberal bunch than the owner. There was short little Rose, the physicist (well, physics student), who was also from Colorado and knew my old town. I grew close to her slowly, and ended up going to see The Devil Wears Prada with her that spring, which I think is as close as I ever got to talking with her about it. There was Julian, called Jule at the restaurant but who I knew as Jules because he'd dated Rachel. I approved of him, mainly because he was a nice, good-looking guy. Gay, I'd've thought, if I didn't know his history with Rachel. Then there was Aaron, a rather built guy who had a soft voice and a definite swish to his step, who I was determined to find out was gay even if he was in the Air Force. It didn't happen.

Finally, there was Nicole. She was the epitome of who I wanted to trust: She was a traveling actress, she'd lived in both London and New York, she had appeared in off-Broadway plays, she had an agent who sent her lists of roles every week. It was after lunch one day in the spring when I told her. We were sitting in the back, and she was paging through that week's list of roles. One of them was for a guest spot on Smallville, and we started talking about that. I never watched it, but I knew (who didn't?) of Tom Welling. I said something about finding him attractive, and that was it. She didn't make a big deal about it. Like with my class, it just was. And I'd been open about it with myself for long enough to realize that maybe that's all it needed to be. I didn't need to make being gay a big deal. Here was a friend who'd lived all over the world, who certainly had met gay people before, and she wasn't jumping up like I was a "weirdo" or like I'd just won some big prize. I was gay, and that was all; it was no different than if I'd taken out my contacts and shown her that I really had brown eyes.

I needed that, then. I needed normalcy, not an extreme reaction. I received it, and as much as I thought I wanted extravagance, I realized that I needed understatement more.

Disturbing Trends

According to About.com, only about 18 to 49% of gay men disclose their sexual orientation to their health care provider. When I saw that statistic initially, I didn't have much of a problem with it. After all, for the majority of gay men, I suspected that sexuality does not play a huge role in their health. Now, though, I'm not so sure.

For one thing, nondisclosure can have an impact on how HCPs are trained. I can't give any first-hand feedback on this yet, but it makes sense that if, say 18% of gay men disclose their sexuality to their HCP, that's only about 1/5 of a minority. Would that be worth additional training of HCPs in specific counseling or concerns? Objectively, I'd have to say no. But, even if there are, what would such things boil down to? My first (and possibly impulsive) answer has to do with HIV/AIDS and other STDs. This, at least, comes from personal experience; when I had the coming out talk with my parents (keeping following the "my gay story" posts), my dad, who's an HCP himself, really only asked if I was having safe sex. But I've started to learn that there are many more medical concerns for gay men.

According to the American Cancer Society, "[s]ome men who have sex with men may be at special risk for a delayed diagnosis of cancer because they may less often take part in screening programs for cancer." Now, why? The ACS offers several possibilities, including past experiences with homophobic HCPs or medicine, general fear of discrimination, lack of a support system, and, most importantly in my mind, "lack of information about health needs of men who are intimate with other men." Because, really, where's it supposed to come from? Are HCPs supposed to start briefing every man with a higher voice or a limper wrist about MSM health risks?

The ACS offers more: "There are special health guidelines for men who have sex with men, so you should seek care from doctors and nurses who are sensitive to your social situation and respect your privacy. They should also be aware of the extra care you may need. If you are in a relationship, you will want to find health care providers who understand and encourage your partner to be involved in your health care." Which sounds brilliant, really, but also a tad utopian for what usually isn't perfect.

But, really, this is one of the reasons I'm pursuing medicine. There's enough ignorance and misinformation among gay health concerns without homophobic HCPs, am I right?

The Cure

No, not the band.

What if there was a cure? Here, I don't mean "cure" in the sense of a relief of disease or symptoms, but in the sense of being able to repress gaiety. The Heterosexualizer, let's say.
When I think of such things, I remember a scene in X-Men 3 (those movies are really just euphemisms for being gay, anyway):
ANNA PAQUIN: Is it true? Can they cure us?
PATRICK STEWART: Yes, Rogue. It appears to be true.
HALLE BERRY: No, Professor. They can't cure us. You want to know why? Because there's nothing to cure. Nothing's wrong with you. Or any of us, for that matter.

Admirable sentiments, Halle, but I would disagree re:your hair.

The movie raises some fairly interesting questions as far as the us versus them debate it presents. On the one side, you have Anna Paquin's character, who's actually a physical threat to other people if she just touches them (it flies directly in the face of the "mutant powers are cool!" deal). On the other side, you have Halle Berry - "there's nothing wrong with us, we're normal, just not the majority." Of course, she can also fly around creating ass-kicking hurricanes, so the euphemism isn't quite on the level I really want.

Comics and movies aside now. If there were a quantifiable way to not only suppress homosexuality but encourage heterosexuality, would I partake? No. Because at this point, when I'm 22, it would not only be carving out a part of my personality, it would result in an utter vivisection of self. Yeah, overwrought, but I said it. But, really, I would compare such a change to being amnesiac and retaining only a few key components of yourself. Suppose your brain was simply Wited-Out at random; suppose you remembered your dad but not your mom; suppose you remembered that you liked Corn Chex better than Wheat or rice; but you have no memory of elementary school. To me, that's what repressing my gaiety would represent.

There's a quote from JFK that got splashed on me a few weeks ago but that I've taken to heart:
"We choose to do these things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." Audio here.
Yeah, he's talking about going to the moon, but I take the quote for my own.

Homosexuality is not personally experienced by the majority. By that, I mean that even if gay marriage is a hot-button issue, even if "Prop 8" is the new Yahoo! top search, it doesn't mean anything in terms of understanding. People may see gay characters on TV, in the movies, in books; people may hear about gay rights and gay bashings on the news; people may have gay uncles and gay friends and gay children; but at the end of the day, the only way to understand is to experience. There is no "being gay" on command, like a show horse. Gaiety extends far beyond the object of love, lust, or desire, and much farther than any stereotype.

I had a friend once, a writer, who brought up the idea of writing what you know. She was a straight female, and she unabashedly said that she would take on writing any character, regardless of religion or gender or skin color or sexuality or whatever. Could she pull it off? Maybe. She asked me to read one of her stories, a story with a straight sex scene. The scene was told from the man's point of view, and it wasn't bad or unrealistic. Maybe she got into the man's skin, or maybe she just knew sex. Could she do the same for a gay person? It's certainly possible that she could write a mind-blowing scene of gay sex, even if the sex itself wasn't good. But I contend that if she did write believable gay characters, it would only be through the degrees of separation of her gay friends, and the filters of her own experience.

I don't want to homogenize every experience; there are as many ways of being gay as there are gay people. But there is an inherent understanding, I think, some kind of almost basic, instinctual thing, that connects gay people on some kind of weird experiential gestalt.

...Then again, maybe I'm full of shit. The next time I meet a guy, I'm going to start up a conversation about experiential gestalts and see if his Jung backflips (education rulez, motherlovers).

Damn. Maybe a more medical look at this next time. Long story short, would you take such a heterosexualizer, and if you would, under what circumstances?

My Story (The Gay Years), Part 3

Thankfully, after high school comes a wonderful experience called "college."

The promise of such a place was palpably exciting. I may have had to spend a summer alone, but this summer, I was determined not to waste my time. If I was going to be gay, then by god, I was going to be gay. How did such gaiety manifest itself? Well, I was going away to the city for college, so I headed right on over to gay.com and created a personal profile. I talked to some older college kids who fascinated me, but they were mostly in other awkward boats - one only liked men twenty or so years older, while another - call him 27, because that was part of his screen-name - was intriguing, friendly, helpful, but balked immediately when I suggested we meet when I got down there.

I wanted to know why, of course. 27 told me that he was a grad student, very close to graduating, and that he worked in the university's registration office and they were looking to hire him after he graduated. He couldn't let them know he was gay, or he'd be putting his "certain" position in jeopardy. He couldn't meet me, he couldn't see me, he couldn't do anything but chat online.

Was he feeding me bullshit? It's possible. Meeting strangers off the 'net can turn skeazy, or so the media tells me, but I was honest and so I believed him. Besides, he had no reason to lie, and he'd picked the perfect lie if he was: I was absolutely ready to believe that his office wouldn't hire him back if they knew he was gay. I talked to him a few more times, then I moved down there.

I knew right away that the school wasn't for me. My roommate was a hobbit-lookalike basketball player from New York who was nice enough but who had impromptu parties in our tiny room way too often. One of the girls who showed up at a couple of those parties, Daphne, was absolutely beautiful and ran with the track team; she actually initiated conversations with me and was in one of my classes. One of the few things I regret about leaving was not seeing more of her, because I think we would've become good friends and she's the kind of friend I would've needed back then. With Daphne, I could have admitted that I was gay, and she wouldn't have had years of recorded high school memories to compare me with. She was having trouble with the transition, too; she was typically pretty in the Southern California way, and while she was radiant, she was perhaps worse off than I was as the ugly kid, because people expected frumpiness and average things from me. Daphne was assumed, at least by me, to be too pretty to be afraid. When I saw her in class, and she confessed how nervous she was, I saw another side of her. I saw myself mirrored in her, really, although my uncertainty probably didn't come from the same source.

Once I decided that I was leaving that school, I spent a lot of time wandering around, giving myself a tour (I told myself), looking for something (I told my friends, though no one ever heard what). I ended up, most days, on the top floor of the library, surrounded by huge glass windows. One day, I was there during a general class block, quite alone. I sat up there for a long time, writing out diaries to myself, trying to figure out how I'd made such a big mistake, what I was going to do next, what I should/could/would do. I wish I had the diary, but after writing for hours (that were probably only minutes), the class period ended and the walkway five stories below was filled with a the post-summer throngs. There I wrote the turning point: "There are a lot of gorgeous guys here."

It didn't make me want to stay, but I cried a bit over that page. Here, at last, inescapable truth! I knew that I was gay! I had written proof! I was admissible in a court of law! It was beautiful and terrible at the same time, but I'd learned what I needed to learn, and I left the library. I spent my remaining few days with my friend Kelly and my old friend Riley. Remember him? He must've been going through a transformation, too, even if neither of us talked about it then; we just rode our bikes around downtown a lot, he looking for natural food stores and whatnot, me just content to follow.

I returned home that weekend and enrolled in the community college. I got a job hosting at the hot new restaurant downtown, thanks to my friend Jennie. But, while things didn't seem quite so rosy as they had during the summer - I wasn't going to live in the big city, I wasn't going to find a lot of gay men - I had taken a very important step: I had told myself that I was gay. I hadn't changed, but I had.

The Amendment

Ah, well. I said I wasn't going to get into it.

George W. Bush. 43rd president of the United States. The Dollyrots said it best: "We were watching the 2000 presidential election results, and at four o'clock in the morning, when we found out that George W. Bush had won, [we] were like, 'The world's probably gonna end anyway,' so we thought, 'Let's just do the band.'"

Perceptive guys. No, the world didn't end. At least, the apocalypse didn't come. But when the president of your country, supposedly (or so it's propagandaed) the most powerful man in the world, gets up on his pulpit and instead of discussing - take your pick - the current war, any security threats, education, health care, immigration ... he takes a potshot at you. You, personally. And not just you, but the people like you. He uses you as a diversion, really, to avoid talking about any of those other things. But what a diversion! He takes your opined moral bankruptcy to the next level: He tries to outlaw you constitutionally.

I remember where I was, the first time I heard about The Amendment. The "Federal Marriage Amendment," as it's technically called. I was in high school, my junior year (the year of silence, if you've been following my story). It was in my history class, and it was a special day; we were taking a field trip to go downtown and compare architecture styles to classical buildings or some such. My class and another were squeezed into our room for fifteen minutes before we headed off. But instead of going over the rules or the procedures, my teacher just looks at us and says, "So. The Amendment."

I don't remember exactly what was said, except that I was beginning to vaguely realize that I'd have a lot vested in such things in the future. What I do remember was what one girl said. She was a cheerleader, as Aryan and WASPy and rich as you care to get, the kind of girl who, if you saw her in a sitcom or a teen drama, you'd say, "No way. No way people like that exist. She has to be a stereotype." Conservative, it goes without saying. And she said, in a very clear voice:

"It's not right. They [read: gays] are people, too. I mean, if your, uh, partner, or whatever, was in the hospital, and you couldn't see him because you weren't married? Because they wouldn't let you? That's not right."

Bitch knew what she was talking about.

Anyway. Despite my earlier claim, I'm sure I'll get into the health care debate at some point, but I just really liked that sticker. It is interesting, isn't it, how we United Statesians move from political fad to political fad. The same folks who clamored for the sanctity and protection of marriage are now rallying against health care reform, I'll be bound. Things will swing back around, I'm sure. Gay marriage will happen. Can't stop the signal, folks.