once i wanted to be the greatest

You can kill the dreamer, but you can't kill the dream.

2011-01-07T14:34:00.001-08:00

I just finished reading Hellhound On His Trail by Hampton Sides, subtitled: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr and the International Hunt For His Assassin.

Before reading this, I admit I was woefully ignorant of any of the facts, forces, mythology, or context of the MLK murder. I knew it was in Memphis, I knew he was here because of a garbage collector strike. That's about it. What Sides does so well is wrap this event in an almost novelized form to give it so much context and life. Alternating chapters highlighting James Earl Ray (and his whole cadre of aliases and fake identities) and MLK, the book builds incredible suspense up to the point of the assassination, and then beyond, as the FBI begins a weeks-long, international hunt for JER. He tries to escape to Rhodesia to become part of a white supremacist paradise that supposedly exists there that he's read about in various nazi and white power magazines.

I really enjoyed reading about JER's fucked up life and the incremental steps it took him to end up murdering Dr. King, but what I enjoyed most of all were the history lessons. Sides is a native of Memphis, and fills the book with all kinds of sociological and political background on why it was such a powder keg of a city. Unlike other black majority cities in the United States at that time, Memphis was once the epicenter of the cotton trade, and had made a lot of white people extremely wealthy, while paradoxically keeping the large black population subservient and in poverty, but employed, nonetheless. (In a somewhat perverted irony, the old "Cotton Row" of South Front Street in downtown Memphis, where white landowners had all of their offices, is now a mile of renovated, upscale condos full of rich white people overlooking the river.) Up until the early 1980's Memphis had a huge celebration, on the scale of Mardi Gras, called the Memphis Cotton Carnival with a King, a Queen, a Royal Court, and a huge barge that would float down the Mississippi with Egyptian-themed decorations to pay homage to the only city in America named after an African capitol.

Cotton Row downtown Memphis

When the cotton jobs dried up due to automation, more and more Delta blacks moved into the city to try to find work. Very little was available except service jobs, and one of the biggest employers was the city itself, in the form of garbage collectors. It was the death of 2 workers by being crushed in their faulty trucks that led to the 68-day garbage strike that was the nexus of the murder of Dr. King.

Another interesting subplot of the book was James Earl Ray's obsession with George Wallace. As Sides describes Wallace's political activities, whether it's intentional or not, he sounds a whole lot like another base-rousing, divisive Republican politician who is the de facto leader of the party, but who party elites don't like because she can't win a general election. I'm just sayin.

It is interesting to me, though, not being a particularly adept student of history, that the arguments conservatives use today are the same arguments they used back in the 60's against civil rights: state's rights, the tyranny of the federal government "cramming" civil rights "down our throats." Wallace was part of a 3rd party American Independent Party hellbent of taking the White House and repealing the gains of the civil rights movement. In a biography of Wallace he is described as "the surly orphan of American politics... the grim joker in the deck, whose nightrider candidacy is a rough approximation of the potential for an American fascism." He called President Johnson's civil rights legislation "an assassin's knife stuck in the back of liberty." And about the riots that swept Watts and other cities, he liked to say you could count on "pointy-headed intellectuals to explain it away, whining that the poor rioters didn't get any watermelon to eat when they were 10 years old."

It would be really shocking if it didn't sound so similar to so much of today's conservative rhetoric. In fact, only one month after King's assassination in Memphis, Wallace held a comeback dinner there (he had dropped out of the presidential race briefly when his wife died of cancer), with 13,000 participants, to rekindle his race.

Nobody can accuse George Wallace of having too much class, that's for sure. No one thought he could actually win in 1968, but that he would have enough power to potentially spoil the race. Life magazine declared, "In both the North and the South, Wallace appears to be tapping a powerful underground stream of discontent."

It is true, kids, this is why we study history. Everything is cyclical, is it not? That, more than anything, is what I found so interesting about Hellhound. Not that I think we're going through anything nearly as traumatic as the civil rights movement of the 60's, but really, the parallels are eerie. And ultimately, we came out of that okay. The book actually make me feel strangely hopeful.

King's death was the first time Wall Street ever shut down to honor a civilian. It was the first time flags all over the country were ordered flown at half mast for a civilian death. Hellhound is that rare work of art that is full of pathos, dread, heartbreak, desperation, hopelessness, despair, and yet still comes out hopeful and stronger for it at the end.

My 2010 Book List

2011-01-01T19:09:00.000-08:00

I read 51 books in 2010, falling short of my goal of 52, to average a book a week, but still I guess 51 isn't so bad. I wanted to rank my top 10, but I find that almost impossible (I know, that's supposed to be part of the fun, I get that), and also I'm really lazy, so instead I will simply present my 10 favorite books in alphabetical order.

Some are new, most are old. Most are fiction. I considered making 2 lists, one of fiction, one of non-fiction, but I didn't read too much non-fiction this year. It was somewhat of an anachronistic year for me in that way. Maybe due to the fact that I was working on my own writing this year for the first time in a long time, I devoured me some fiction.

So without further ado, here is the list of my favorite books I read this year, fiction and non, in alphabetical order!

A SINGLE MAN by Christopher Isherwood

I have to admit, I was drawn to this book after seeing the movie, which was remarkably loyal, right down to much of the dialogue. What the movie doesn't get, however, and why books will always be better than movies, is the internal monologue of the narrator, a middle-aged English professor in California mourning the death of his longtime male lover in the 1960's. He is angry but witty and perceptive. And mostly he's exhausted, fed up with American greed, capitalism, and self-entitlement. A heartbreaking and also hilarious little novel.

BELOVED by Toni Morrison

One of the most frightening and moving books I've ever read. After the Civil War, a "freed" female slave murders her own daughter rather than see her be kidnapped and exploited by the "white man." The daughter's ghost haunts (literally) the rest of the novel and her relatives. A furious novel, and in typical Morrison fashion, full of brutal violence, both physical and spiritual, but also redemption and hope.

CITY OF QUARTZ by Mike Davis

Subtitled Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Quartz is really a social and cultural history of Los Angeles, including its politics, in which I realized that L.A. is actually a very conservative, segregated, and hostile city. Not at all the liberal, dreamy Utopia it's sold as (maybe that's just Northern California, and I confused them). Nevertheless, it's a fascinating and thorough history of that gleaming city, through the eyes of a religious socialist.

THE HUNGER GAMES by Suzanne Collins

This was my year to read a fair amount of Young Adult fiction, but nothing stuck with me like this book. Set in a near dystopian future, where America's youth are randomly selected each year to live on a deserted "island" (really an elaborate television theme park/studio) a la Survivor, and kill each other off one by one, for the viewers at home. The winner gets some sort of special prize, I forget what exactly, but it's not important. Kind of like Battle Royale, if that movie had been made by someone with a heart, not to mention a brain. The concept isn't unique, nor is the thesis, but it's the great characters and almost unbearable suspense that make this book resonate. Violent and disturbing, but it doesn't feel gratuitous or mean-spirited. For some reason I haven't gotten around to reading the sequels yet, but I will.

LIGHT IN AUGUST by William Faulkner

Starring the unforgettable Joe Christmas, this has so far been my favorite Faulkner novel (of course I've only read 3). Like all other Faulkner novels, it's impossible to describe, but concerns itself (also like all Faulkner novels) with race relations/racism in the South; extreme religion; mixed identity; murder; and possibly latent homosexuality. A pretty fun and wild ride.

THE LITTLE FRIEND by Donna Tartt

Actually kind of a nice contemporary companion piece to Light in August, this Southern Gothic yarn concerns a very precocious (but not in the typically annoying fashion usually found in literature and movies) tween girl searching for her little brother's murderer. Creepy as hell, and totally engrossing and atmospheric, it's a perfect summer read. It'll still never replace The Secret History (Tartt's first novel) in my heart, but it makes me wonder why she isn't more prolific. It's too bad. Just based on those 2 novels, she's one of my favorite contemporary novelists.

METHLAND by Nick Reding

Anybody wanting to understand a major facet of the swirling rage and despair currently circulating through American culture and politics, could do worse than to read this book. It goes a long way to explain the loss of entire ways of life in this country, and what that has meant for small-town America and the folks who inhabit it (or don't anymore, because everything they have has been lost). It's bleak, to be sure, but also showcases one small-town mayor making major strides in his attempts to refashion his small farming community ravaged by unemployment, drugs, and violence into something new and more palatable and sustainable.

REBECCA by Daphne de Maurier

The classis gothic suspense novel upon which the very famous Hitchcock movie is based, although I watched the movie after I finished the book and I thought it sucked, a major snoozefest. As with A Single Man, so much is lost in the film translation. There is a plot, but the suspense and terror is truly to be found all in the protagonist's head, as she grows increasingly more paranoid and unsure of her own experiences and judgment, as she goes slowly crazy in a giant, empty castle that may or may not be inhabited by the ghost of her new husband's dead wife.

STORY OF MY LIFE by Jay McInerney

I can't help it, I have a soft spot in my literary heart for the 80's Brat Pack, and McInerney has quickly risen to belong in my top 5 favorite contemporary authors. A fictionalized account of one Rielle Hunter who McInerney dated for about 5 minutes back in the 80's, he claims to have been so fascinated and appalled by her and her friend's completely self-absorbed and amoral behavior that he had to write a book about her. Told in first person from her point of view, she has one of the funniest, most glib and flippant voices I've ever read. I was laughing out loud through parts of this novel, but I highly suspect the real Rielle Hunter was never this clever. Or twisted.

TESTIMONY by Anita Shreve

A very contemporary novel about a sex scandal (which goes viral) that rocks an elite New England boarding school and ruins the lives of the 3 boys involved. They are accused of gang-raping a girl, but may have all been set up. No matter: they committed a penetrative act and got caught on tape, and this book is about the fallout. It's incredibly depressing, and I suppose it could be billed as a "cautionary tale," but what I loved about it is the skillful way Shreve jumps around in the narrative, offers different points of view, and deftly untangles how it all ties together. When something like this happens, no one ever really knows the full truth, and no definitive account is ever offered and that seems to be the point. Haunting.

I hope you enjoyed my list, and maybe from it you can find something to read that you might also enjoy! Happy New Year everybody!

If I can make it there

2010-12-06T19:01:00.000-08:00

Tom was only gone for about 30 minutes tonight; he left the house to come pick me up from work, which I got out of about 15 minutes later than usual. When we arrived home, a police car was parked across the street, the neighbor's door was standing wide open, and our neighbors who lived across the street (but next door to the house with the cops and the open door) were standing outside. For the 4th time in 3 months, a front door on our street had been kicked open, within a span of 2 blocks.

Then, as I was unlocking our front door to come inside, after chatting with the neighbors for a bit (the neighbor whose house had been burglarized, obviously, wasn't home, and no one could get a hold of her), our house alarm was activated and started going off.

I guess it was just coincidence, as we had been standing on the porch talking for 5 or 10 minutes before coming inside. A moment later, our new alarm monitoring service called to ask if everything was ok. That was comforting. Several weeks ago we left town and returned to our alarm blaring. We had no idea how long it had been going off, but until that point, we just assumed it was being monitored. Not so. It was nice to have the alarm, but if no one gets notified if it's activated, it doesn't do a whole lot of good. So we got a monitoring service a couple weeks later, right before we left for Thanksgiving.

Tom and I have very little of any value (laptops, really, that's about it). If someone wants to steal a shitload of books they can have at em. What I do find unsettling is that if the door gets kicked in while we're gone, my cat will most likely get out, and if we're out of town, that just won't sit with me.

Living in this city has certainly been an exercise in paranoia. Naturally, the security industry here is sitting pretty. Having an alarm is simply a matter of necessity. I've never thought so much about crime in my life. In Austin, I used to occasionally even leave my doors unlocked and not think twice about it (which, granted, probably wasn't very smart, but nothing ever happened). In Portland, in our first, ground-floor apartment, I always locked the door, but again, didn't think twice about leaving all the blinds open all day long, and sometimes the windows too, if the weather was nice. It's a different mindset, to be sure. Someone mentioned once that Memphis would never attract the educated talent that it wants to this city if it doesn't get its crime under control. There may be some truth to that. It would certainly be a factor for me in deciding whether or not to put down roots here.

I don't get too worked up about crime. I guess I'm just an eternal optimist, or I'm naive, or I'm just in denial, but crime just doesn't freak me out that much. Having 4 houses broken into just on a two block stretch of my street in the last 3 months certainly does give me some pause, however.

Tonight makes me sad. The neighbor across the street is just a nice, quiet, probably mid-30's single lady. Last week she put up a beautiful Christmas tree in her front window that glows radiantly at night. The cops said that was probably why she was targeted. What fucking assholes (the thieves, not the cops). one consolation I take from this is that no one was home at any of the break-ins. That clearly means they don't intend to hurt anyone; they just want their stuff. Still a violation to be sure, but slightly less scary.

Churches

2010-11-30T17:52:00.000-08:00

The Church of the Immaculate Conception, at Belvedere and Central.

As I've said many times before, one thing Memphis has going for it is beautiful architecture, a lot of which is in pretty bad shape (which is very captivating in its own way), but much of which has also been lovingly preserved. Some of the most striking and inspiring buildings in the city happen to be churches (at least one good byproduct of being such a Jesus Freaky city).

In my quest to document the extremes of Memphis's built environment (both the blight and the beauty), churches have to have a place. I went out on an absolutely gorgeous fall Sunday this past weekend to photograph an extremely small sampling of what Memphis has to offer. The churches I took pictures of are all in a very small area of Midtown, mostly in Central Gardens and the immediately surrounding streets. All these churches are within a mile and a half of my house, so I get to see them all the time.

Idlewild Presbyterian, corner of Union and Evergreen, my favorite of the bunch. It's also about a block from my office.

Close-up of the Church of the Immaculate Conception

Grace St. Luke's Episcopal at Belvedere and Peabody.

Union Avenue Methodist, Union and Cooper, soon to be demolished to make way for a CVS. I will refrain from editorializing.

The arches at Idlewild Presbyterian

And, as always, more pictures (and more churches) are here!

And About

2010-11-20T15:51:00.000-08:00

Inspired by an event in Oak Cliff, Dallas last year, where a young man convinced a bunch of people to come to a decrepit and crumbling block and imagine its possibilities, a friend of mine made a similar thing happen this weekend in Memphis. Broad Avenue, about one block east of where Midtown ends, is a gold mine waiting to happen. Home to a few art galleries, one bar, which happens to be one of my favorites in Memphis, and a couple of restaurants, it's primarily full of empty warehouses that border an ugly industrial area. At night it gets very dark indeed.

A New Face for an Old Broad brought together people from all over the city, including already well-established restaurants and cafes to transform Broad Avenue into a thriving urban street full of retail, galleries, music, cafes, bike lanes, people, and life. At least for a weekend. The idea is to get people to see a mostly abandoned area's potential to support business and encourage street life. Apparently so far it's been very successful. My friend who originally got the ball rolling on this endeavor is already eyeing other strips of crumbling eyesores around Midtown to get the makeover treatment.

Tom with our friends John and Michael. Aren't they cute?

I am loving Memphis right now. The air is so clean and fresh. The temperatures are perfect. The trees are bursting urgently with luminous colors. Everyone is in such a good mood. I also went to the Memphis College of Art's holiday bazaar this morning. Naturally I couldn't afford anything there, but it was super fun to go browse. I did buy one dry-mounted photograph from a series a guy did of an abandoned falling-down theater somewhere in the city. Not sure where it was, but the pictures were beautiful.

After Broad Avenue, I went running with John and Michael on the Memphis Greenline to continue to take advantage of the perfect day. There were so many people out. And I ran 6 miles without stopping!! So far (in my life) my record has been about 4. And it wasn't even that hard. I really like having some running buddies who won't let me quit when I start complaining that my legs are hurting. It felt like an accomplishment, and one that I didn't even set out to do.

Tonight we're going to a birthday party, and tomorrow I'm leaving first thing for Nashville for the Tennessee Counselor's Association annual conference. I'm really looking forward to that!

Memphis Blight pt 2 (Hickory Hill)

2010-11-12T17:14:00.000-08:00

My friend Dmitry and I decided today to go out and take some photographs of Memphis. I don't think we necessarily intended to go photograph a bunch of apocalyptic blight, but that's how it turned out. We spent about 2 hours in Hickory Hill, in southeast Memphis.

Hickory Hill has about 65,000 residents and was once its own independent city. In the late 90's it got incorporated into Memphis, and as history has shown over and over in this city, that caused a great deal of white flight, and the neighborhoods, and subsequently the city, went downhill. Its demographics now echo, pretty closely, the rest of Memphis, with the African American population there about 60%. Supposedly it also has the highest Hispanic population of any neighborhood in the city.

Never having been there, it felt pretty solidly middle class and suburban to me. Most of the streets we drove down reminded me of the ranch-style, 1980's-era homes of the neighborhoods in my hometown. Most striking, though, were enormous apartment complexes that had been lost to fire or simple abandonment, often sitting there rotting in the middle of otherwise perfectly benign suburban streets. I've attached some pictures here. Many more can be found at my Flickr site in my Memphis set which I hope to be adding to on a pretty regular basis. With nice stuff too, not just ugly blight.

Habitat For Humanity is building a huge subdivision next door to this acres-wide eyesore.

You see a lot of these on abandoned buildings in Memphis.

Yummy Soup

2010-11-10T18:57:00.000-08:00

I've taken lately to reading the blog Poor Girl Eats Well, which I really appreciate the ingenuity of, but it also seems like she uses a lot of moderately poor and processed ingredients in her recipes. They also tend to be heavily meat-based, thereby eliminating many of them right away, as Tom is a vegetarian. Sometimes, though, I'll stumble across one that is extremely delicious, like this one, for a spicy, white bean and beef soup.

Tom and I made it tonight, replacing the beef with Yves Meatless Ground Round, which is probably not especially good for you, but once in awhile it's fine. We also added considerably more kale than she calls for (1 cup; we put in a whole plateful), and replaced the amaranth with quinoa, since neither of us even knew what amaranth was, and naturally our grocery store didn't have any anyway. But the quinoa was fine, and I love quinoa anyway and have been trying to incorporate more of it into my diet.

But the soup is incredibly easy to prepare, cooks quickly, even with the grains, and is DELICIOUS!! It's very thick and hearty, and with just enough spice to have a really nice kick, but not make it impossible to eat. Soup usually doesn't do it for me, and I have to supplement it with some heavy carbs or a giant dessert. Some crusty bread would be great with this soup, but we didn't have any on hand, so some Trader Joe's Whole Grain and Flaxseed crackers went splendidly with it, as we did have those in the pantry. It would be enough by itself, though.

I heartily recommend this warm, satisfying, easy, very nutritious soup. And the portions in the recipe make a gigantic pot. I'll definitely be able to take this to lunch the next 2 days.

Ours looked even more delicious than this one!

I thought I was someone new, someone good

2010-11-08T19:56:00.000-08:00

Lou Reed directed the video for Susan Boyle's version of "Perfect Day." That is one of my very favorite songs of all time, and while I don't love the Boyle version, I do think the video is pretty spectacular. Really fits well with the sort of ethereal take on the song, too.

Memphis Blight

2010-11-06T09:00:00.000-07:00

Memphis has an estimated 8,000 vacant and abandoned properties within the city limits. Most of these are homes (or apartment buildings) that are unsecured, crumbling, have overgrown lots, and naturally, are magnets for crime. These things keep neighborhoods oppressed (what businesses or people are going to move next door to something like the above, in Midtown Memphis?), property values down, and crime high. Blight is a major factor in inhibiting Memphis's growth, including by keeping crime at ridiculous levels.

New Memphis mayor AC Wharton has a plan. For the last year he has been working with Memphis's top attorneys to bring Memphis back as a true city of destination. Memphis loses, on average, 5 people with college degrees every day. One of the first things he did was appoint a Bike Czar, and pledged to build 60 miles of bike lanes all over the city in the next 2 years, many of which have already started appearing around the University of Memphis neighborhoods. He has lobbied for and received millions in federal grant money to boost public transit availability in the inner city, which now pretty much stands at third-world levels. As opposed to focusing on "regionalism" and the erroneous belief that investing in the region makes the inner city grow (when in fact it is just the opposite: investing in the inner city makes the region grow. You can't have healthy suburbs without a healthy city), he is wholly focused on Memphis, and Midtown in particular.

Last week he announced a very ambitious plan to combat blight, by a first-wave rollout of hundreds of lawsuits to property owners who have let their buildings and lots deteriorate. The Memphis Flyer has an excellent article this week on his efforts. Many of those are lobbied against Wells Fargo, which owns hundreds of properties around the city due to foreclosures and has left them completely neglected, as well as not paid thousands and thousands of back taxes on any of them, depriving the city of much-needed (and deserved) tax revenue.

Though it didn't see the kind of price spikes that occurred in cities in the so-called sand states of California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida, Memphis has been hit hard by the foreclosure crisis. The city has filed suit against Wells Fargo, claiming that the lending giant engaged in predatory practices against African Americans and damaged the city's property-tax income.

The foreclosure crisis, combined with the economic downturn and negligent owners, has led to blighted properties all over the city. In the last 10 years, more than 80,000 foreclosure notices have been served in Memphis, with maybe half of those resulting in actual foreclosures. There are 8,000 vacant properties in the city, as well as 13,000 vacant lots.

In the mostly African-American neighborhood of Frayser, in North Memphis, the foreclosure crisis has hit very hard. Entire city blocks up there have been abandoned and left to rot, and consequently crime has skyrocketed in that part of town. My own landlord is Executive Director of Frayser CDC, which buys foreclosed properties and flips them (my own current rental home is a foreclosed property, though it's in Cooper-Young) is quoted in the article:

Steve Lockwood, executive director of the Frayser CDC, buys foreclosed properties with the hope that he can get to them before they fall into total disrepair.

"We do foreclosure counseling to try to keep people in their houses. We're absolutely adamant about that," Lockwood said. "But once they come up empty, they've got to be dealt with."

And more empty homes means more blight. As the number of foreclosed homes has increased, the Frayser CDC has had to keep pace. According to Lockwood, they've redeveloped as many houses in the past year as they have in the last seven years.

In his quest to move dispossessed families back into homes, Lockwood often struggles to identify the legal owners of property.

"We've just done one really nice house, and there's a comparable house right next to it that is empty and in foreclosure," he said. "But we can't find anybody who claims to be the owner. In the meantime, we've got an abandoned place that is unsecured, and the yard is waist high. We've got a nice little house next door that we've put a lease-purchase person in. It's a problem."

Over the next year, Mayor Wharton plans to serve hundreds more lawsuits to individual owners (many of which live out of state) and to Wells Fargo. Thank god. Having only been in Memphis a short time, so far it has impressed upon me as being a city with a lot of problems, and is often very scary and intimidating. But it's also a city I've already grown to become very fond of, and it seems to have a lot of potential. Midtown Memphis, where I live, is composed almost entirely of historic neighborhoods, with so much beautiful old brick architecture, and homes, and wide, tree-lined boulevards. The people are so nice and accomodating, and if this city could only retain and attract more young people willing to invest in its long-term livability, I really think Memphis could become a world-class city again. I truly believe that. There is enough diversity, culture and history here to make it attractive to all kinds of people. And as of now, at least, the cost of living is astonishingly low (especially after living in Austin and Portland).

I will write more soon on some of the other grass-roots efforts around the city to make it simply a nicer and more progressive place to live and be. I also want to start a little photo-blog to showcase some of Memphis's more beautiful architecture and design, so much of which is mid-century art deco, and old, early century southern architecture. (For more on this, my friend Dmitry, who just moved here from San Francisco, has some interesting posts, also from the perspective of a non-Southerner who'd never even been to the South before. Check out his blog: true grit.)

Did you ever wonder why we had to run for shelter?

2010-10-14T11:09:00.000-07:00

Today I have returned from my week-long "intensive" i did for work. This involved spending 144 around the clock hours with 5 other people and doing extremely intense group therapy. Experiential therapy, which is impossible for me to explain. It involved a lot of psychodrama, the acting out of old trauma in individual's lives, lots of role-playing, and generally leaving the participant a trembling, sweating, sobbing mess heap on the floor. It's connected strongly to a person's physical being, and a belief that the physical and the emotional go hand in hand. That your body holds trauma and utilizes it in all sorts of self-defeating ways. Experiential therapy believes that talk-therapy will only get you so far, and that unless you really physically exorcise your trauma, and physically express your anguish, there will be no true healing. Think primal scream therapy. Think physically reliving incest and sexual abuse through role-playing and physically acting out a new outcome.

It will take me weeks to really process what went on there, and I'm sure the reverberations of what I went through and experienced this week will continue to make themselves known in all sorts of wonderful and unexpected ways as I go back to my life. There was a language spoken there, a language of recovery, that I didn't always understand. Every person there was in active recovery, except for me. From extreme eating disorders, to drug and alcohol abuse, to sex addiction that has shattered their life, or some combination of all of those things. Everyone knew my intentions (I was there primarily as a training tool, since this is what my employer does; this week was partly to test whether or not I wanted to stick around), and everyone was still so accepting. It's impossible to convey the unconditional support and acceptance that I both witnessed and felt there.

There was so much pain, laying bare your soul and making yourself utterly and completely vulnerable in front of total strangers. But on the flip side of that comes a closeness and intimacy that is difficult to duplicate or find anywhere else. A real joy had formed in each of our hearts by the end of the week, and a profound love. If I never see any of those people ever again, I'll never forget the gratitude I feel for their sharing their pain, anguish, despair, tears, and trauma with me. For letting me know them so completely and unabashedly.

When I left today the day felt so crisp, so new. Driving my car back through midtown Memphis to my house, the whole city felt fresh and new to me. And I know that in the last week I've felt more compassion than I thought possible, and shed more tears for pain that wasn't mine than I thought possible. And I stood in front of a group of people and let them watch me cry. I never would have thought that was possible. I didn't go as far with my own issues as I would have liked, and there were all kinds of reasons for that (primarily that I don't have near the baggage that those other souls did, and that my employers were the therapists in charge, and frankly, it's not really appropriate for me to work out my issues with them in the same way).

But I can honestly say my life has been changed. In both some big and small ways. This work feels radical to me, and subversive, in the best ways possible. I have a couple of professors from grad school who would probably have a heart attack if they knew how much I love this. How much it blew my mind. I wish everyone could experience it.

Not even a mouse

2010-09-24T08:35:00.001-07:00

We had only been in bed for about an hour last night when what seemed like an earth-shattering crash made both of us leap out of bed in a flurry of racing hearts and caught breath. We stood in the dark, unsure of what to do. "Hello!" I called, terrified, down the dark hallway into our second bedroom, which has seemed to serve as the locus of our paranoia lately.

The night before, you see, Tom was at school attending a poetry reading and I was home by myself. I discovered that night we have motion censors on both the north and south sides of our house, because they both kept getting turned on. One of them is right outside the window in the second bedroom/office, and the other is right outside our living room windows (which aren't on the front of the house, but the side). I was in our office, on the internet, and noticed the light come on through the blinds. The dogs in the neighborhood were going nuts that night, with constant barking (and there are a lot of dogs in our neighborhood). I didn't think much of it, and eventually it turned itself off. But I hadn't even been aware of its presence until that night, after almost 5 weeks of living here. Probably some random dog walking around, I thought.

A few minutes later I was walking into the kitchen when I noticed another light shining through the blinds of our living room window. I peeked through and saw that we had yet another motion censor on that side of the house, I had also previously never been aware of. This gave me a little bit of a pause, as the dogs were still going nuts all around our house.

Hmmm, I thought to myself, growing a little scared and paranoid. All the blinds in the house were shut, and the doors were locked. I thought about activating the alarm, but didn't. I went back into the office, my skin tingling a bit, and a chill went through me when I saw that the light outside the office had turned itself on again.

Shit. Now what? This boy has seen too many movies. Plus, at the moment we're sharing a car, and Tom had it, so I thought, "What if someone is walking around the house trying to figure out if someone's home?" And lest you think I'm simply paranoid, our neighbors across the street have had their home broken into 3 times in 4 years. Just a couple of weeks ago, the house next door to them had its front door kicked in in broad daylight. Within the past month, 3 other houses within 2 or 3 blocks of us have been broken into. Memphis takes its crime seriously. The dogs were now quieting down.

After several more minutes of hand-wringing, I decided to call the cops. Just, you know, to let someone know I was feeling paranoid, and maybe they could drive through the neighborhood or something. So they ended up sending 2 cars to my house, and they talked to me a bit (which, honestly, made me feel silly, because I hadn't actually seen or heard anything), and they walked all around the house and the backyard. (And I'm pretty sure one of them was Officer Aubrey, but I wasn't sure and it seemed inappropriate to ask. And yes, I sometimes watch that show.)

Obviously they found nothing. But later that night, after I had gone to bed, Tom was still up working and noticed the sensor outside the office turn on yet again. So he left the light on in the office when he came to bed.

So last night, we both crept into the darkness of the living room, huddling together. The kitchen light was on. "Did you leave the kitchen light on?" I asked Tom, as he had come to bed after me. I don't remember his response, but I think he said he did. I called for the cat, but I didn't see her anywhere. One of us reached down and turned on a lamp. Nothing seemed amiss. I walked into the kitchen half expecting there to be a person standing around the corner, having just kicked through our back door. Nothing. And no cat. Door still securely fastened.

So we both crept slowly together toward the back bedroom. I turned on the light. Everything seemed normal.

What the hell was that crash we'd both heard, and that caused us both jump out of our skin from sound sleep?? We were both so confused, and also freaked out.

Then I saw it. I breathed a sigh of relief, and almost started laughing at the absurdity of it. 2 weeks ago (or 3?), I bought a huge, old framed poster of a United States map to hang above the giant empty space of wall above our TV. Well, that had decided after all this time to fall, and simply land, upright, behind the TV and the TV table. We both finally breathed, and found the cat underneath the coffee table. The only other time in my life I'd been that freaked out was when I lived in Dallas and the light fixture in my bathroom fell one night and crashed to the floor while I was sleeping. I was convinced then that someone had broken my back sliding-glass door and was absolutely mortified to walk out into my living room to investigate.

So we both went back to sleep, eventually, after our hearts and nerves calmed down. But even now, in the morning, some of that paranoia still remains. I wonder if this is just how I'll feel the whole time I'm living here. Having your home broken into seems to me just about the most invasive crime that can happen to someone. How can you ever feel safe after that? Frankly, I'd rather be mugged at gunpoint if I had to choose. Let's just hope it never comes to that.

Numbers

2010-09-21T20:52:00.000-07:00

To prevent myself from writing a rambling, rage-filled rant about how much I hate America and politicians and never want to vote for anyone ever again, including the "fierce advocate" Obama (a post I have already written and prudently sat on before I "published"), I will instead write a small, personal and congratulatory (to myself) post.

I got a job yesterday! And I have to say it was a little bit serendipitous, but it also came about through some deliberate and assertive networking. Several months ago, upon first learning that we were going to be moving to Memphis, I emailed someone at the Memphis Gay and Lesbian Community Center to see if they might have any recommendations for any places in Memphis that provide mental health services and were either GLBT friendly, or even specialized in GLBT issues. The man who responded was very nice and forwarded my email to probably 50 people in Memphis, several of whom wrote back to me. One of them was this guy, who wanted to know a little bit more about what I was looking for.

Long story short, we met up after I moved here and had a brief networking interview (well, about 45 minutes), where he got a little more information and said he had a few ideas of how he might be able to help me. Eventually he got back to me and asked me if I'd be willing to come back and meet the other 2 therapists that work there. I agreed, and they offered me a job.

It was a position that they had sort of been thinking about creating for a couple of years but hadn't really bothered. And then they met me and decided it would be "their loss" if they did not utilize me in some way. So I'm coming in preliminarily as an office manager of sorts, but they plan to begin training me in their modalities, and eventually I will get to start co-leading therapy groups and helping to co-facilitate their "intensives," which you can read all about here. I think this will be a very good fit for me. It seems the guy was really looking for someone to mentor, which is great, because I love to be mentored! He also just joined (I can't remember the exact name) the board of the Tennessee Strategic Planning Association for GLBT issues, or something like that. Basically a statewide mental health advocacy association for homos. They're having a big conference in November in Nashville he already said he wants to take me to. Which is super exciting!

So, you see kids, networking can really pay off. I guess especially in a city like Memphis that doesn't get a lot of young, educated people moving in. Mostly moving out. But I think this can be the start of a great relationship and a fantastic opportunity. I start tomorrow!

And speaking of relationships, Tom and I got engaged over the weekend! Also, I've been obsessed with this song for weeks now:

Tornadoes

2010-09-16T21:24:00.000-07:00

Inspired by this story of Time magazine accidentally using a 35-year-old photo and saying it was new (of a tornado passing by the Statue of Liberty), I decided to Google tornado pictures, because, you know, I'm kind of a natural disasters geek. Here are some of the cooler ones I found!

The photo in question, from the summer of 1976

A heart-stopping photo of a tornado in downtown Miami in 1997

Iowa City, 2008

Salt Lake City, 1999

Canadian city (I'm guessing Toronto?), 2000

There's a calm before the storm

2010-09-15T21:26:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I have a "networking interview" at this place. Last week I had one here, and a job might actually come out of that one. The guy keeps being sort of cryptic about it, but promises to have me back for an official interview in the next few days. Tom sometimes marvels at my ability to cold-call places and ask if I can come in for an interview. It's sort of astonishing, if you actually have the credentials (even though I don't, really) how many places will invite you to come on over. As long as you act like you do, no one really knows the difference, and once you're in the door you can wow them with your smile.

In school they tell us over and over that networking is the key to employment. That was always what people said about the entertainment industry too, except then I felt like "networking" half the time was a code-word for giving someone a blowjob. I'm not really so jaded, but it's certainly a different experience. I also had a real interview on Friday at this place. My second with that company. In the first one, I told the lady I didn't want the job before the interview was even over. Not my bag, counseling gang-bangers, and kids awaiting trial for homicide, rape, and severe physical assault. No thanks. I am very gifted at some things when it comes to counseling, but probably not so much that. The latest interview was to be a counselor to foster kids and their foster parents, which I think is much more my smile. I think that interview went well. I also think, if I may be so bold, that it speaks to my inherent employability at some level if I can forthrightly say in one interview that I don't want the job and then she can recommend me for something else. One thing about the mental healthcare industry is that honesty is certainly valued. And self-awareness.

I also think it's just Memphis. People here are nice. And, I think, sort of desperate for out-of-town blood. In Portland (or even Austin, probably, for that matter) calling strangers out of the blue and asking for 30 minutes of their time would make people think I was creepy and desperate. Or just annoying. I've already made more friends in the 3 weeks I've lived in Memphis than in the 2 years I lived in Portland. That place is already starting to feel like somewhat of a distant memory. Whenever I tell people here where I moved from I get 1 of 2 reactions: a hearty welcome and some warning about the crime but that it's a great city; or a suspicious eyebrow raise and a "Why the hell did you move here?"

Today I went jogging in the old growth forest part of Overton Park, which was lovely, except I almost stepped on a large(ish) snake and subsequently almost had a heart attack. I'm glad no one was around to see me hyperventilating while I waved my hands up and down, muttering "Ohmygod, ohmygod" over and over.

Pretty soon I'm going to start taking some pics of my neighborhood and neat things in the city to post. And our house. That we love.

Also, for some reason (well, I know the reason, but it's complicated) I've been obsessed with this song for, like, a week now.

Sign 'O the Times

2010-09-14T21:25:00.001-07:00

I honestly don't know whether to be excited about all those teabaggers winning their primaries tonight, thereby handily securing those seats for Democrats in November, or to be incredibly depressed because, contrary to what some of you might believe, I do desperately wish the United States had a serious conservative party. Not only because it would make the whole country stronger if we could actually have real, adult debate about important issues (all the Republicans know how to do is scare up fear; at least they seem, for better or for worse, to have mostly moved on from gays being the primary boogeymen in America), but because the Democrats are only marginally serious themselves.

I can't think of another time in my adult life when I actually, fundamentally cared less who actually won in November. The Democrats can also all go fuck themselves as far as I'm concerned, and frankly, I think it might be kind of fun for a couple of those nutbags to win in November. Then, perhaps, we could have the complete meltdown of the Republican party that this country so desperately needs. Then they can maybe rebuild themselves into something useful.

That might also be wishful thinking. Le sigh.

Like mountains beyond mountains

2010-09-08T21:12:00.000-07:00

Tonight when I was putting together my shitty new crooked and wobbly metal shelf for my kitchen, and my shitty new wobbly particle board bookshelf to house all of our cookbooks, I got incredibly depressed.

It was a purely existential moment of fleeting despair at how fucking expendable everything feels. I made a commitment recently to only buy old furniture whenever I wanted a "new" piece of furniture. This would mean scouring thrift stores, antique stores, garage sales, etc to find that perfect sturdy old bookshelf to house all of our cookbooks. I love doing that stuff anyway, and finding a cool old table or shelf that you love is so gratifying. (Granted, this has only happened to me once.) But tonight I caved, proving as well how expendable my principles are. Natch.

We went to Target and bought a metal shelf for $17 and the particle board shelf for $20. You can't beat the price at least. But I felt defeated. We've been here almost 3 weeks and really needed this stuff, and I haven't found any suitable, or suitably old, ones. So I caved.

I've never been one of those people who wanted everything in their house to match, or who wanted a bedroom or living room "set." How dreadful. I want everything to be mismatched, and to have been collected, and to have a story behind it, even if it's someone else's story. In short, I want everything in my house to have been found, to have been discovered, to actually have some intrinsic emotional value. Instead I'm buying cardboard shelves at Target that will get thrown away in 2 years and added to all the crap squeezing out all semblance of life that's left on this planet.

Yes, putting together a shelf tonight has thrown me into an incurable depressive funk. It used to be that if you wanted a new set of dishes, you had to save for it, and go to a special place to buy them, and you took care of them, and valued them. I'm not so sure it shouldn't still be that way. I'm not so sure that simply being able to buy whatever we want whenever we want it isn't the whole root problem of everything that's wrong in our world. It's why humans are so unkind: because emotions are expendable. It's why no one values anything: because you can always just go buy another one. It's why we wage unwinnable wars against faux enemies: because resources will always be there forever to be exploited (or at least that's the common line of thought). I'm not convinced the future isn't going to look like the past. We'll probably all have to go back to riding horses and growing our own food and making our own clothes and everything technological will reverse (was that Herman Hesse who wrote a book about that?).

I've been reading the original Dracula by Bram Stoker this week and this afternoon I started to think about how annoying it is that the whole story is told through letters and the character's diary entries. When it then occurred to me that it's annoying because no one communicates like that anymore. No one writes 6-page, eloquent letters to each other anymore. It's a lost art, and the book, though only 113 years old, truly felt like a ancient relic. And then I decided I liked that it was all told through letters and diary entries. No one could write a book like that anymore. Think about it. Who now would write an entire 500-page novel told through snail mail correspondence? No one, that's who, because it wouldn't get published and no one would read it. Or if they did, it would be a gimmick. If anything, in this day and age, I think literature serves a purpose of reminding us how to read something more than 140 characters long.

I'm not saying anything new, I realize that. But I like this stuff.

Dirty South

2010-08-28T20:49:00.001-07:00

My first impressions of Memphis were driving over the Mississippi river from Arkansas into downtown at dusk. I'd heard tales of the blight of Memphis, and the rampant poverty, but I'm not sure I was quite prepared for what I actually saw when I arrived. Blocks upon blocks of crumbling or boarded up buildings; sheds that were actually liquor stores with bars on all the windows and doors; homes with the ceilings or porches caving in, but people clearly still living in them; roaming packs of dogs; burned out cars; and empty, desolate fields and lots, some of them full of garbage. I won't lie: my heart sank, and I nearly panicked at what I had got myself into.

As we drove on, and neighborhoods began to look only marginally better, we got stopped by a train trying to get over the track that runs only 3 houses down from our house. As we waited, and waited, and waited (at one point, the train simply stopped and sat there for awhile), 3 teenage boys were running down the street with 2 unleashed pit bulls. If I'd had a paper bag at that point, I would have started breathing into it.

Eventually, however, we made it to our new home, where our landlord was waiting for us ( and he is SO nice). The house is beautiful (pictures to follow), and I really like our neighborhood, but yeah, Memphis is a change. It's a city that is hemorraghing population, the cost of living is dirt cheap (our relatively large house is putting us back $700 a month; in Austin, our house would be no less than $1,200, or probably more), and at least according to Wikipedia, it's the most dangerous city in America. The dog at the house next door to us either spends all day on a 3-foot long chain, or simply runs around unchained, and likes to come up on our porch and try to follow us into the house. A house across the street has 2 pit bull puppies that also sometimes run around. Last week, apparently, 2 unleashed pit bulls attacked an old man somewhere in the city and he died.

Awesome.

Grocery shopping here has also been a bit of a challenge, or "uninspiring," according to a friend of mine here (yes, I've already made a new friend). But we're managing, and adjusting to any new place requires flexibility and a change in routine. I'll get by. It's a city I'm really looking forward to exploring culturally (with the rich music history, and the wealth of civil rights history, there's a lot going on in that regard) and socially. Honestly, at this point, my biggest complaint is the sprawl and how you have to drive 10 minutes to get anywhere. I guess I got really spoiled in Portland, because Austin is that way too, and while I didn't like it there (but expected it, and didn't really know much better), it's making me crazy, and kind of depressed, here in Memphis. Another adjustment, I suppose.

I assume I'll be blogging a bit more regularly here, since in Portland I just never felt inspired to blog. Here, I anticipate feeling more inspired. Already good things are happening, which I will also write about. I think, once I get past the shock of actually living in an impoverished southern city of extremely dubious distinction, I'll settle in and start making it my own. A lot of people love living here. Hopefully soon enough I'll understand why. And since we have a guest bedroom now, maybe lots and lots of people will come visit! Memphis has its own special kind of beauty, much like the rusty, dilapidated industry of the Pacific Northwest, which I think is beautiful.

Cicadas in August

2010-08-20T13:19:00.000-07:00

It seems ungrateful to complain about the rough beginning of our trip back east (east of Oregon, anyway): about how the restaurant at the hotel only had 1 cook, and we waited over 20 minutes on a salad before we gave up and left (after a day of moving); or about how much I fucking hate American Airlines (sorry, Victor!) and how miserable they make every trip I ever use them for and that they have a complete lack of regard for their customers; or about how Littlejeans escaped from her carrier on the airplane and the stewardess had to chase her down. But that, at least, was funny.

The first night we arrived in St. Louis we talk a walk around the neighborhood after dinner. It was just what summer should feel like. The cicadas and crickets were buzzing, the air was warm but damp and a little breezy. The air just feels so different here than in Oregon. It's impossible to put my finger on, and I don't think I would ever get used to Oregon summers.

I brought along 3 books for travel: Light in August by William Faulkner, which I'm reading now and loving, though making very little headway it seems; Danse Macabre by Stephen King, whom I've decided is in my top 5 favorite contemporary writers; and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which I've never read, but feel like I should have by now. We had no idea how long our stuff was going to take to be moved from Portland to Memphis, but as of this morning, according to our moving coordinator, it will all be there Monday morning. Which is super exciting, but also stressful because Tom will be gone to orientation all day, and I have a job interview at this place at 1pm. So they better get there on time.

Last night some friends of Tom's hosted a potluck for us at their house which was utterly delightful, and I drank too much. And today we visited a used bookstore that was incredible and it stormed. How I've missed storms! It's easy to forget that up in the Pacific Northwest, they don't actually have weather. It rains, but that's climate, not weather. Nothing ever really happens up there except some occasional snow. We've done a lot of walking, and record shopping, and Miss Littlejeans is loving Tom's parents house, and the air-conditioning (as are we!) and is settling in nicely. Hopefully she'll settle in just as nicely to our house in Memphis.

The new Memphis abode, waiting for us to come fill it

"I could waltz across Texas with you."

2010-08-09T10:41:00.000-07:00

Collier's wedding in California was beautiful, and so much fun. Four days in the mountains, with no internet, very little phone service, and just good food, great friends, tons of laughs and great conversations. Everything was perfect.

Many, many more pictures are HERE.

Combining according to the laws of a closed order

2010-08-03T00:48:00.000-07:00

I've recently been thinking a lot about families, and how they shape us. Not in the usual ways that people talk about that, but in how things get passed down in a really unconscious way. How what families talk about, or don't talk about, or the secrets they keep, or the habits they have, effect subsequent members of the family.

My mom says that my older brother has pretty much the exact same personality as our great-grandfather, who my brother never knew. In fact, my grandfather died several years before my brother was even born.

The French psychoanalyst and neo-Freudian Jacques Lacan says that everyone speaks in unconscious signifiers, which, as I understand it, are more than just words we say. They are words that sound like other words, said in place of what the person either can't really say, or doesn't know to. They are very common in instances of repression, or trauma, when an individual doesn't have a way to construct a narrative about their life. But aside from trauma or repression, everyone uses signifiers in their speech, because according to Lacan, even using language is traumatizing, because it will always be woefully incomplete (as a form of expression).

Thus, these same forms of expression, or non-expression get passed down, even in very unconscious or historical ways that can even skip generations. It's more than genetics; it's a way of understanding and being in the world. I don't think it's just families that do this, though, but families have the biggest influence on this for each person.

How is it that so much can be absorbed into each person throughout a lifetime and then expelled in so many other ways that are completely unconscious? How come so many families, through generation after generation, just can't seem to get it right? It's more than conditioning. It's their language, even in the way they talk about things when they're really talking about something else. Resentments, terrors, fears, hopes, desires. All of these things are embedded in our DNA in one way or another, whether we know it or not.

In more ways than one, we're always stuck with our families.

Teach him he's alive before he wishes he was dead

2010-07-28T12:59:00.000-07:00

Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children...images so violent and malicious that they seemed to be my only point of reference for a long time afterwards. After I left.
-Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

Bret Easton Ellis has officially run out of ideas. I first read Less Than Zero when I was a freshman in college (appropriately) and I pretty much hated every character, but it made an impression on me. It wasn't until a bit later that I realized I was supposed to hate every character, and that Zero wasn't necessarily supposed to be entertainment. It was a document, so to speak, of a life. It seems too extreme to be real, painting as it does a world so full of drugs, materialistic consumption, power, money, and fame, that its inhabitants have become completely removed from any kind of reality. They are totally devoid of feeling. In one scene, a bunch of kids sit around a Malibu mansion watching a snuff film that was purchased on the street that contains children being tortured. In another, some friends of the main character tie a 12-year-old girl to a bed at a party in West Hollywood, shoot her full of drugs and take turns raping her. The main character's (and narrator's) response to this? To walk out on the balcony and say, "It's not right, what you're doing."

It is a disturbing book, to be sure, but I'm also not completely sure it's fiction, which is the point. It's a post-modern conundrum at its finest. It's an amoral document that dares you to be offended, but then says, "Hey, this is just my life, what I've seen. I just call it as I see it."

Ellis is at his best when he is plotless. When his characters simply move through life and events and observe. His next to last book, Lunar Park, was such a meta-analytical mess, it revealed a man who appeared to be seriously off his rocker. The main character's name was Bret Easton Ellis, but it's not the same BEE that wrote the book. The one in the book is heterosexual (everyone knows the real BEE is gay), lives in the northeastern suburbs, and has children. But he was also a writer, who, I believe, wrote American Psycho, I'm not sure. Anyway, he wrote something about children being murdered, and then, the plot of Lunar Park is about a real-life murderer who is reenacting the murders in the book with children from the fictional BEE's neighborhood, and then starts coming after his children. And then there was something about the BEE character's dead father showing up as a ghost, or something. I don't remember. Jay McInerney (one of my favorite contemporary novelists) also makes a cameo in the book as himself, but was apparently none too pleased with how he was portrayed. But it was a mess and ridiculous. Too much plot, which could have been interesting in hands that are perhaps more skilled in the art of storytelling.

Last week I just finished BEE's latest, Imperial Bedrooms, supposedly a sequel to Less Than Zero, but only because he says it is. It concerns Clay, the narrator of Zero, but in Bedrooms, in another meta-analytical twist so confusing it makes your head spin, he claims to have not written the book. He also claims that he and all his friends were invited to the movie premiere, and were stunned when the movie was nothing like the book, and thus, they felt their lives had been stolen by Hollywood and made into an after-school special. So in Imperial Bedrooms, both the book and the movie of Less Than Zero exist, but it's really BEE commenting on them through his narrator. Nothing happens in the book except some people get brutally murdered, and in one particularly noteworthy but completely superfluous chapter, Clay, again the narrator, hires young boy and girl prostitutes to come out to Palm Springs with him where sexually tortures and debases them for no reason except to do it. Towards the end of the chapter, the girl prostitute, after having tried to escape but being caught and brought back tells Clay that he has made her believe in God again after being an atheist. Why? Because she was in hell, and the Devil lived in Palm Springs. Admittedly, it was a chilling moment in the book, but not worth what came before it. Especially since there was no reason for it to be there except to say that Clay, that young, impressionable and sensitive narrator who fled Los Angeles once and for all at the end of Less Than Zero, has nevertheless become a heartless product of his environment (the film industry and Hollywood) 25 years later. There is some sort of mystery of mistaken identity going on throughout the book (I think...) but it's only a mystery because no one speaks in complete sentences and because the characters in the book want it to be. The Hollywood cliches are all there (the struggling starlets; the lifers in the industry who have had so much plastic surgery they are no longer recognizable; the drugs; the sexual debasing; more snuff films uploaded onto the internet whose validity the characters debate; etc etc.). It's all so tiresome at this point.

I still think Less Than Zero is a great book, and provides the perfect backdrop for an era (the mid-80's). Rules of Attraction is also fantastic, and shows BEE actually dealing with at least a couple of people who actually have hearts and feel pain. And which was made into a pretty faithful movie adaptation, strangely enough, considering its shifting narrative and POV. American Psycho I've not read, though I feel like I have. Glamoramma and Lunar Park are both pieces of shit.

I try not to judge the artist by the art, though I always do anyway. I think Bret Easton Ellis is probably either a horrible person, or someone in so much pain, like his altar-ego Clay, who feels he must torture and rape innocent children just to prove that he still has power. Imperial Bedrooms is a completely empty novel, written by an individual wanting desperately to cash in on a famous name (the previous novel) but having no basis for actually doing so. It's too bad. It cheapens the original. Whatever hope, or salvation, or light, no matter how small, that was presented at the end of Less Than Zero by Clay turning his back on his life and disappearing, is rendered moot with this book. Is BEE trying to say that no matter what, we all turn into monsters? Or is he saying that when faced with such a barrage of banal evil, no one is actually strong enough to pull away? Whatever the case, all hope is lost. And Clay hires people to torture his best friend to death and put videos of it on the internet because he's jealous of a girl. That's the kind of boring, unimaginative low this book stoops to.

Whatever the message, it's no longer a message I'm interested in listening to.

Bad Moon Rising

2010-07-07T23:36:00.000-07:00

Despite my often loud and frequent claims to the contrary, I don't disbelieve in god. I don't believe in god, either. I definitely am not a christian. I just don't purport to claim to actually know what exists out there, but I'm pretty certain it's not some dude who somehow appeared at the beginning of time and acts as a personal therapist to everyone on earth and concerns himself with minutiae of our dull and dreary day to day lives. But I do think there's something, some spiritual plane of existence that we mere mortals will never understand or really know about as long as we're part of this mortal coil.

But it's also possible I have to believe that in order to reconcile the fact that I believe in ghosts. Without a doubt. And maybe in vampires too, but not nearly as strongly, and not like they are in the movies. But ghosts? Yes, absolutely. Mostly just because I want to. Which is how I view religion as well. People believe because they want to, because they simply make the choice to, or not to.

Earlier tonight I was reading a review of that movie Session 9, which is really fucking scary, and all about ghosts and insane people. So I decided to look up the Danvers State Hospital, where the movie takes place, and where it was filmed. And, incidentally, according to Wikipedia, was built on the hill where most of the women were executed that had been convicted of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials. There's a lot going on there.

Danvers State Hospital

Anyhoo, someone got the brilliant idea of turning the now abandoned Danvers hospital (also rumored to be the birthplace of the pre-frontal lobotomy) and turn it into "luxury condos" (is there any other kind...?). I mean, seriously??? Would you live there?

I can say that I would not. I like the idea of it, but I would be way too freaked out all the time, seeing and hearing ghoulies every place I went. And I wouldn't be wrong. No thank you. I mean, I know every place that humans have ever lived is haunted and ghosts surround us all the time. But why put yourself in a place that has seen such misery and torment and violence?

Seriously, you're just asking for trouble.

It's true

2010-07-06T23:38:00.000-07:00

I'm back.

I decided recently that one reason I stopped blogging was because I never really warmed up to my new blog. When I moved I thought it would be real fun to start over, start fresh, reinvent myself yet again. But just as I never truly warmed up to my new city in any way that felt terribly meaningful, I also never warmed up to my new blog. Even just typing in this entry feels like home again. Also, I guess, I've been really fucking busy, but that's also winding to a close. I have approximately 3 hours left of my graduate school career. Huzzah! It also started to feel like not a single person was actually reading it, which is as it is.

So faced with the prospect of looming unemployment, no school to go to, and a new city where I will know 1 and a half people (a good friend of mine and her husband that I've met once, hence the half person), I figure I might have lots of time to be writing about my musings on whatever it is I'm doing or not doing.

I took almost 2 hours last night to read back through old entries on this here bloggy, and realized how much I enjoyed doing it. So I will start again, and maybe someone besides me will enjoy it. Maybe not, but if nothing else, I would like to simply get back into the habit of writing more frequently. Keeps my brain nimble. And keeps me interested in things.

I hope you'll start coming back to visit me again!

So long, farewell.

2008-08-18T10:32:00.000-07:00

This applies not only to Austin, but to this blog as well. In the interest of a true "starting over," this blog is now dead. But that sounds so harsh. Defunct is a better word.

But never fear, as I have started a new blog to take up to the PDX with me: Songs About Rainbows. I know, it's kinda silly, but there you have it.

I hope you've enjoyed reading and that you will follow me to my new home, and if applicable, update your links page accordingly.

Goodbye.

Love,
ryan

Very spacious with lots of room for guests

2008-08-13T21:01:00.000-07:00

I have a home in Portland! The rub, unfortunately, is that it's not available for living until September 6th, which leaves me homeless for slightly over 2 weeks after I'm there, but that's okay. Jody has lots of room for me.

Anyway, Collier says it's worth it. It's in the Hawthorne neighborhood, just across the river from downtown. It's a 4-plex, built in 1929, all hardwoods, big windows (which have all just been replaced with double-pane energy efficient ones), a working fireplace, arched doorways, built-in bookshelves, a small green space outside, and a shared basement with washer and dryer. It's one block from the major buslines, and the whole neighborhood is apparently very compact and dense with lots of awesome stuff to walk to, including several food co-ops. And it's pretty inexpensive, especially for the neighborhood.

So yay! I feel better now, a huge burden lifted from my shoulders, knowing I now at least have a place to live. The fact that I'm leaving has really sunk in this week, especially since today was my last day of work. I was ecstatic to be leaving, but I'll really miss some of the people there, and that was sad. My manager gave me a really sweet card with his contact information in it, and my friend Jake, who's a major cyclist, is giving me a $75 helmet, and $40 u-lock for my new bike I'm going to buy when I get up there. Which I was very touched by. He said he just had them lying around and he would love to let me have them. And lots of people, as they were getting off their shifts, came and said bye to me and gave me big hugs. I felt very loved.

So here are the photos from the Craigslist ad of my new house. Come visit me!!

What goes on

2008-08-04T13:29:00.001-07:00

It's weird what can go on under your own nose in your own neighborhood, and one had no idea it's happening. I've always taken the safety of my neighborhood for granted, since it's pretty quiet, I've never had any trouble, and it's pretty hoity-toity. Recently, however, I've joined the Rosedale Yahoo group in an attempt to sell some furniture and discovered that people have been having rocks thrown through their house windows, animals mutilated and left menacingly in their yards (clearly the work of humans and not other animals), attempted break-ins, even while people are home. And Tom swears up and down that he saw someone walking around in my backyard the other night while I was asleep, at like, 3 in the morning. It's all enough to make me reconsider some of my decisions, like occasionally leaving my doors unlocked, or leaving the front window totally exposed, even at night.

I'm sure, comparatively, it's a very safe neighborhood, and maybe some of the above things are related, but mutilated animals, especially, give me the creeps. I guess that statement's a no-brainer.

On the other side of this coin, I only have two weeks left in A-Town. Two weeks from tomorrow. I officially depart the 19th. Jesus, what happened to the summer??!? It's close enough that the anxiety of moving, alone, is keeping me up at night, not to mention my anxiety about all I have left to do that I haven't. Instead I'm going to Barton Springs this afternoon. I haven't been in over a month! That's just sad.

I'm a Fool (to do your dirty work)

2008-08-03T20:36:00.000-07:00

This essay is one I wrote for submission to a literary magazine in New York that wanted break-up stories from the perspectives of the people doing the breaking up, since historically, break-ups are always examined from the POV of the person that got dumped. And the Dumper is pretty much always totally demonized, regardless of the circumstances. Luckily the person curating the magazine loved my essay. So we'll see if it actually sees the light of day beyond this blog. (And yes, I'm sure my ex would probably tell this story very differently as well. But that's why he can go write his own stupid essay if he wants to.)

For years now (3 years, one month and 7 days, actually…) I’ve resented that my last boyfriend forced me to break up with him. I take no small consolation, however, from the fact that I was his longest relationship to date (by 9 months) and that I was the first person that had ever broken up with him; he’d always previously been the Dumper. Never mind that it was a decision I made grudgingly and only because I knew he wouldn’t do it. I never expected, I guess, that he would be so relieved by it. I had let him off the hook. I had done the bastard’s dirty work for him.

The Dumper should never underestimate the power that he or she holds by doing the dumping. I might also add that they should perhaps never overestimate that power either. Aside from threatening to toss yourself off a cliff, breaking up with someone can be the most supremely manipulative action to take in a relationship. I was hoping that by breaking up with him, he’d know I meant business and it would frighten him out of his complacency and he’d realize what he was losing and beg me to stay. Only it didn’t happen that way.

Our relationship was dead. I think we were both aware of that, but neither of us was quite ready to admit it, at least not out loud. We had never gotten totally comfortable with each other, and we were both exhausted. It was no one’s fault, we were just mismatched. Timing, many people say, is the real key to relationship survival, and for both of us, it was the worst timing possible. I, however, was prepared to start over, begin from scratch with our new knowledge of this, but J. wasn’t. This was a fact later confirmed to me when a short time after our break up he told me how “relieved” he was that it was over. What was left of my heart, at that moment, crumbled to nothing. I think what’s most infuriating about that is that I knew he wanted out long before I did the breaking up. Except that J. lacked the fortitude and courage to break up with me. Partly, I think, out of a genuine love for me, and not wanting to let the dream go, but also, I am firmly convinced, because he didn’t want to be the bad guy.

My friends were all pretty sick and tired of hearing me whine about how miserable our relationship had become; how much he’d pulled away; how afraid I had become to be myself around him and the tension that created; how much I hated that he didn’t trust me enough to be truly open and giving of himself. Finally, after J. had been out of town for a week and made no attempt to see me for days upon his return, I decided I was finished. He had out-of-town guests coming in the next day for a full weekend of Central Texas barbeque-hopping that he was very excited for me to meet, so I had to wait until the weekend was over.

One might think having this kind of knowledge, and hoarding it from your completely unsuspecting lover of a year while you had to entertain his friends would make for pure misery, but you might be wrong. It’s sort of like how when someone commits suicide, and all of their friends are so shocked because they seemed so much happier than normal right before it happened, and they thought for sure the suicide committer was feeling much better. Well, that’s because the person committing the suicide had already made the decision to do so, thus freeing up that previously occupied part of their mind, or emotions. They vow to simply enjoy their last few days, or weeks, or whatever. Well, that’s sort of how I felt about this relationship. I was ninety-nine percent certain it was over, and that I was pulling the trigger, I just wasn’t positive about when.

So we had a lovely weekend taking his Northeastern friends to five different BBQ joints in one day, gorging ourselves stupid, hitting up flea markets, and having a great time. That evening back at his house he and I made fresh gazpacho from tomatoes and ingredients we bought at a farmer’s market in Luling, Texas. We had incredible sex that night and slept like babies. The next morning, however, he irritated me, we got in a fight, and I stormed out of his house and skipped out on breakfast with the guests. The next night, Monday, I showed up at his place and broke up with him on his front porch.

I told him I thought it was something we should do, but not something I wanted to do, and left the decision up to him. I suppose that was a bit cowardly of me, but what else was I supposed to do? I was in love; so in love. And he wasn’t. And we both knew it. He said he’d have to “think about” my proposal, which basically amounted to, “This seriously needs to change, or it needs to end,” but as we talked it became quite clear that we just didn’t see things the same way anymore. We’d had a good run, but it was done.

As I gave him a goodbye hug, his lip trembled and he choked up, and it was the only time I’d seen him show any real vulnerability in the year that we were together. I walked off his porch and went home. It was 2 days before I cried about it, but once I started, I didn’t stop for a year.

Being the one that instigated the breaking up, in essence being the Dumper, gave me a false sense that it wasn’t really over. If he’s always dumped everyone else, I reasoned, but I dumped him, and he sends me emails telling me how sad he is and how much he misses me, then surely I’ve made a mistake, I thought to myself. I kept the hope alive that all we needed was some time apart and a chance to miss each other before we got back together. It took me two years to let go of that. We talked occasionally during that time, but it became increasingly clear that we had nothing left to talk about, and even less still in common. And that he had zero interest in getting back together. Did he love me? Yes. Did he want to get back together and be in a romantic relationship with me? Uh…no.

Emotionally, it still feels like I was the one that was broken up with, even though intellectually I know it isn’t true. If I hadn’t brought it up that day, who knows how things might have turned out? I suspect he wouldn’t have let it go on much longer, but I can’t say for certain. It was a milestone in my emotional development, to be able to recognize that it wasn’t working, that maybe, despite all I wanted to believe, he wasn’t the One for me. For the first time, I had to make a decision to let go of something I wanted more than anything.

We’ve both moved on, and I think probably much happier with other people now, but I can always look back and say, “I let him go, and we both survived, and we’re both probably the better for it.” I still think of him often and hope he’s doing well. I suspect we’ll never speak again, and I don’t particularly want to. If I were to ever see him again, that little spark, that little “What if?” might still be there, and that’s nothing I’m interested in ever opening back up.

Honeymoon in Venice UPDATED

2008-07-29T19:55:00.000-07:00

Jody's entry now appears beneath mine in this post. Enjoy!

The group-blog writing project is underway. The assignment was to write a short essay about something that happened to you in a very specific place. The goal was to make the essay more about the intrinsic connection to the physical place than about what actually occurred there. Here are the participants:

Beth
Bryan
Emily
Mandy
Meredith
Stacy
Tom

And mine:

Being in Europe always makes me think of horror films. Trains zipping through the countryside and hundreds-year-old villages brings to mind old superstitions and ancient legends. I always feel like I’ve literally been transported back in time where people don’t go out after dark, and werewolves and vampires are the biggest threats to humanity, not oil or nuclear war. Everything in Europe has a slightly sinister feel to me. The way people are still largely clustered in urban areas with so much space in between them of rolling hills and forests, perfectly fit for all manner of beasts, fairies or goblins. The sheer age of so many buildings still in use (or at least still standing), with so much history etched into their psychic and physical structures, so much of that history so traumatic, bloody and violent.

There is no official origin of Venice, on Italy’s eastern coast. The most commonly accepted theory is that it was created by Eastern Romans escaping further encroachment by various invaders, most notably the Huns in the late 8th-century. The 118 islands making up Venice were the last physical resort, and they thought for sure, on those muddy, disjointed, sinking islands, they would be left alone. For the most part, it seems, they were right.

Crossing the brief stretch of ocean from the mainland of Italy to the heart of the city of Venice, I snapped a picture of my traveling companion staring out the window at the horizon of Venice approaching like the Emerald City. She’s chewing anxiously (or nervously) on a toothpick, the orange glow of early dusk spilling across the table of the booth we got on the train. Our backpacks and guidebooks are splayed across the table; anything to keep our restless hands and minds busy during what seemed like an interminable train ride from Milan to Venice. Venice was the crown jewel of our vacation, the one place we both insisted we see, even if we went nowhere else, and the place where we spent the longest.

Our guidebook informed us that very few people actually still reside on the islands of Venice (the majority of current inhabitants live in Terraferma, the mainland area of Venice), and of those, only the ones in the tourism trade are still there.

As we exited the train and stopped at a small café to grab a quick sandwich, the only thing going through my mind was my most recent cinematic exposure to Venice in the 70’s thriller Don’t Look Back, about a small elfin woman stalking the dark alleyways and dead ends of a city built on war and desperation, slaughtering small children with a tiny knife. Venice is the perfect setting for a thriller or a horror film; I can’t believe more filmmakers haven’t made use of it, unless the cost is just too prohibitive.

As Collier (my friend) and I explored the sidewalks and alleys of Venice after dark, searching for a restaurant to get a proper meal, I was overwhelmed with the sheer darkness of it. Some alleys (“streets”) were no more than 6 or 7 feet wide, with buildings rising up 5 or 6 stories on either side. Most of those buildings were deserted, abandoned by people no longer able or willing to make a living in a city that no longer had any sort of practical function, except to be a tourist resort. It could be Detroit as easily as it could be Disney World.

What charmed me the most about the state of Venice was the complete lack of “dressiness.” The majority of the buildings remained completely dark, with only small lamps every ten feet or so to illuminate the alleyways. Restaurants and cafes weren’t the easiest things to come by, frankly, and the nightlife seemed to consist of two or three bars with drunken tourists crowding them to capacity and overflowing out onto the sidewalks and small plazas.

The name of the hostel where Collier and I stayed escapes me, but it was an old converted palace in what might have been the darkest and most hard to find corner of Venice. Directly on the canal with about a 3-foot sidewalk, we finally found it only by the “street” number. The name was posted nowhere. The hostel was run by three middle-aged ladies who didn’t speak a word to us (probably because I’m pretty sure they didn’t speak English), and sat in a hot, tiny office together watching television. Collier and I were the only people in the hostel, which was at least 4 or 5 floors. We had a room with 3 beds, and it was at the very end of a long, creepy hallway. And of course, the bathrooms were at the opposite end of said hallway, around 2 corners. The sheer immensity of the building was humbling, along with the fact that we were 2 of only 5 people in it.

Our second night in Venice, we returned from a late dinner, near 10 ‘o clock, and as we approached our hostel, warm, beckoning light poured out from the open second floor windows, which happened to be a small ballroom. We heard a soprano singing, some Italian aria that floated out like a vapor and ricocheted and echoed off the nearby buildings. The effect was ethereal. Unreal. Wordless, Collier and I sat down on some steps leading to the black, still waters of the canal in front of our hostel and just listened. A couple of small little crabs climbed from underneath the water, slipping and clawing at the moss on the partially covered steps. I commented on them, and we sat and stared at them, watching them do their thing, while the young soprano upstairs did her thing.

When she was finished singing, she was met with thunderous applause from her small audience. As we continued to sit there, soaking in this surreal moment, this exemplar of what, to me, Italy was all about, Collier said that she thought this is why people went on honeymoons. To experience something together that neither of them may ever get to witness again, or to make that first discovery of a place or thing you love, together. I think I tend to agree, though someday, I will go back to Venice. I probably won’t stay in that same place, and I may or may not go with a lover, or husband, or whatever, but I will go back, even if it’s by myself.

It was at that moment, that night, that Venice ceased to be creepy to me, and became completely magical and otherworldly. Despite having spent barely over two days there, it is my favorite city in the world, etched in my emotional memory like a first meeting with someone you fall madly in love with. I may spend the rest of my life getting back there, but I will get back.

And Jody's Story:

"Maude"

I walk by it almost everyday - the house in the middle of the block. It is painted white, but the paint is old and is flaking at the corners. The lawn is carefully manicured with planted flowers and tall ornamental leaved plants. In the driveway there sits a Ford Taurus as carefully kept as the yard. The house itself has two floors and large, wood- framed windows. The house is grand in an old-fashioned way. I imagine hardwood floors, high ceilings and light streaming in creating fancy shadows.

But in the midst of all of this careful and sophisticated grooming, there are inconsistencies. The largest window on the first floor facing the street is covered from the outside with a large, brown sheet. And sitting behind the shining car is an old, light blue and white Chevy truck placed on top of cement blocks. The house stirs my imagination.
Often, there is an old man trimming, cutting, and cleaning. He always smiles and says “hullo” as I pass by.

I imagine there is an old woman inside.

Her name is Maude and her hair is gray and trimmed into an above-the-shoulders bob. Curls line her face, coming in close at the cheeks. Today she is wearing white tapered slacks and a brown, tan and green flowered blouse. She’s standing in the kitchen; bright, midday light shining in through the two windows. She’s making sandwiches on paper towels. He’s in the living room rustling through something. She can hear him, but she only half wonders what he’s doing.

Maude tears some lettuce leaves from the iceberg head and pulls a plate from the cupboard.
“Maude, come here and look at this,” he calls from the living room.
“Just a minute,” Maude replies with a quick and unconcerned voice. But the plate she’s holding is set down too abruptly and it clangs loudly onto the blue and white tiles of the counter. Maude walks quickly to join her husband. She worries about her sandwiches. She walks heavily across the floor, her pants making brushing noises as her thighs pass back and forth against each other. She sees her husband in the corner of the room, kneeling on the dusty, hardwood floor.
“Look at this Maude.” He sounds happy.
In his hands is a picture of the two of them in a group with 4 other people sitting around a table. He turns to his wife and holds it up for her to see. Maude is in the center of the photograph holding her arms high into the air with her hands in fists as though she just accomplished something challenging. Her husband isn’t sitting next to her. Instead he is sitting between two women. Maude sees that they are her two sisters. On his right is Beth whose face is turned to the right looking at Maude. Her face is beaming. On his left is Anne. Anne is looking straight ahead with a perfectly posed smile, hands disappearing below the table, probably crossed nicely in her lap. In between the two sisters sits her husband. He is staring straight ahead with a sincere looking smile on his face. His brown hair is messy and one of his brown eyes is reflecting light in such a way that it makes him appear as though he is squinting. Both of his hands are placed firmly on the top of the table with his fingers curled as though he is trying to dig holes into the white, lace tablecloth.

He hands the photo to her so that she can take a closer look. “Do you remember this photo, Maude?”

Maude puts her hand onto her husband’s shoulder. She forces a smile and quietly replies, “I remember, Sam.” She turns and walks slowly back into the kitchen, her thighs swish, swish, swishing.

As Sam carefully places the photo back into the envelope where he found it, he hears the rustling of his wife in the kitchen.

“Did you want chips with your sandwich?” she calls.

Rock Band is fun, but it's more fun if you have any clue what you're doing.

2008-07-23T19:38:00.000-07:00

I started out on drums, playing "Orange Crush" by REM while my brother sang and my nephew played guitar, but I did very poorly. I fared slightly better on "Creep" by Radiohead, rocked the house singing "Don't Look Back in Anger" by Oasis (99%!), and got kicked off the stage playing guitar on "Don't Fear the Reaper." Too bad.

Things that were awesome:
My nephew knows all the words to "In Bloom" by Nirvana.
For some reason I did really well drumming "In Bloom."
Listening to my brother sing "Maps" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs is pretty funny.

Mandy & Victor: I'm sorry Ellen and I poo-pooed playing Rock Band this weekend. It would have been really fun. And you guys would have let me play "Celebrity Skin," unlike my mean brother.

Strategery

2008-07-22T19:06:00.000-07:00

Playing Risk with my 2 brothers whenever I go home to visit my family is a tradition that goes back to 2001. That Christmas, I was living in Austin and my oldest brother still lived in Little Rock (about 3 hours from my parents), and we both got snowed in at my parent's for an extra 3 days because of a giant, unexpected blizzard. So to pass the time, my brothers and I started playing Risk. We must have played 6 games in those 2 or 3 days, and somehow it stuck. Now my oldest brother lives about a half mile from parents, so whenever I go visit, the three of us, at some point, bust out the board.

I actually despise playing Risk. I think it's boring and stupid, and even worse, it makes me feel stupid. My oldest brother, on the other hand, loves it. He's the total left-brain, total logic, math and science, computer guy. I guess he just has fun playing with my other brother and myself, because it never fails, every game, he just wipes the floor with both of us. This past Christmas, somehow, someway, I actually managed to win. It was a total accident, and if you'd asked me how I did it, I wouldn't be able to explain it. I just did. It was a fluke.

Nevertheless, I think it gave me an artificial confidence. Because tonight, we played again, and I do believe it might hold a record for the shortest game ever. In just over an hour, my oldest brother managed not only to win, but to win so swiftly and quickly that even I didn't have a chance to get bored before it was over.

So I play Risk. It's a fun thing to do with my brothers, and mostly we just sit around and laugh a lot and drink a whole lot. Not that I'm drinking, really, while I'm at home this trip, because my Sunday night binge in Dallas ended up all over the bathroom of the airplane the next morning on my flight to Arkansas. I knew I shouldn't have had those last two champagne/vodka drinks. Oy.

Today, however, I had a lovely afternoon picking wild blackberries in my parent's fields with my 6-year-old nephew, then baking a cobbler with them from scratch with my mom, then playing in the pool with my nephew for about 2 hours after that. (I was alternately the sea monster and the "rescuer.")

Tomorrow I'm going out on a long bike trail with my dad, then taking my nephew to see wall-e. I'm very excited.

Then possibly another Risk game. Which I might actually at least attempt to win, after tonight's humiliating crush.

Dallas

2008-07-19T22:27:00.000-07:00

This morning at the Farmer's Market we bought eggs, meat, tomatoes, peaches, potatoes, onions, corn, cucumbers, a mint plant, spinach ($2 for a giant bag!!!), and about 20 pounds of raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries. But maybe the best part of the trip was the guy selling "'ponic maters!" (Hydroponic tomatoes.) He was pretty awesome.

Then we bought a lot of alcohol.

Today:

3 gin and tonics with raspberries, blackberries and blueberries floating in them;
1 mojito;
3 honey-flavored vodka drinks (this crazy vodka from New Zealand that Ellen bought;
and one bowl of vanilla ice cream with grilled peaches and more honey-vodka on top!

Tomorrow we're making vodka-infused chocolate milkshakes. I can't wait.

Go! Time

2008-07-17T22:12:00.000-07:00

I'm leaving town tomorrow for a much needed reunion with 2 friends, then heading up to Arkansas for a few days to see the family before I head out west. Someone brought up recently that this will be the first time I haven't lived within driving distance to my family. As far away as I am now, I've always known that I could hop in a car and be home within a work-day.

Not anymore.

That's a very strange feeling, and one that I hadn't really contemplated before. That doesn't really change the tenor of the move for me. Yet. It may once I'm there, though being surrounded with 2 of my greatest friends from Austin and reuniting with a high school friend (from Arkansas) will probably lessen that "distance" feeling quite a bit for me.

So, yeah, life is interesting these days. I officially became "over work" today, towards the end of my shift when some douchebag customer (is that redundant?) was giving me all kinds of grief about the pettiest stupid shit in the world, and I realized that I truly didn't care. I just stared at him and let him rant then called a manager then went back to reading my copy of the New Yorker like I was doing when he walked up. I am disconnected, in the best possible way. I won't miss work. I will miss a lot of my co-workers (okay, a few of my co-workers), but the job? Not so much. My friend Jake and I, at work, have been trying to find a time to go to Barton Springs together for the past 2 weeks, and tonight I was all, "I've known you for a year, both at school and at work, and now that I have 3 weeks left, I'm trying desperately to cram in some hanging-out time." It's strange. The things you realize you've taken for granted. Ah well.

I'm feeling lots of pressure right now to cram in as much time as possible with people before I go, which is also ironically having the opposite effect that it's supposed to (or maybe this is the right effect?). I'm starting to get irritated with my lack of "alone time," which is very valuable to me, and need lots of (several hours each week, and at least an hour or so each day). But it's my own fault. Maybe if I'm sick of everybody before I go I won't be so sad to go.

Just kidding.

I could never get sick of my friends. I just might need to slow down a bit. Savor the time instead of cramming it. I had a lovely leisurely breakfast with Meredith and Noah this morning, which Noah, the little angel, slept all the way through. I need more of that stuff. Slow meals, unhurried hours.

My anxiety over how many loans I'm taking out is allayed slightly by a new budget I've drawn up, which, if I stick to, will allow me to save $12,000 over the 2 years that I'm in grad school. Barely a dent in what I will finally owe, but enough for a pretty sweet first payment. Ironically, while in grad school, I will have more money than I've ever had.

Well, that's not true (I made more at Esoterix), but considering I won't have a job, it'll be a fuckload.

I'm ready. Well, not quite, but if I had to leave tomorrow for good, I'd be at peace with it.

The next 3 and a half weeks are going to fly. Shit. I can't believe that's all I've got left.

Those damn dogs Part III

2008-07-16T19:41:00.000-07:00

I don't think I've received more of a personal response to anything I've yet written on this here blog to anything than I have to this post, showing the email that was written to me by one Greg Heilers re: my own letter to the Statesman about the dogs locked in the car.

After I fired off my vicious rant, he did actually reply back again, after which I let it die. I didn't bother responding for a variety of reasons, but mostly because I lost interest and found nothing in his reply worthy of arguing about. However, almost everyone that's emailed me about that post has also asked if he responded back.

I sort of felt bad for the guy, so I never posted his reply, but when some motherfucker who doesn't even know me calls me lazy and irresponsible, they can go fuck themselves. (Now, if it's someone who actually knows me, on the other hand, I'll be happy to hear them out.)

So, on that note, since everyone's asked me about it, I'l go ahead and post his reply. I'll save any editorializing, except to say that his bit about the public schools is my favorite, I think. Especially when he blames "psychologists" for essentially making them into KKK training camps and brothels. Okay, that's all. (If it's confusing at all, he takes each of my paragraphs and responds to them.)

So without further ado:

I am aware that the Statesman places limits on the amount of wordage
one may submit in a letter. Perhaps, if you had spent less wordage
excessively complaining about what 311 *didn't* do, you could have
revealed more about what you *did* do.

>
> And yes, in response to your question, I do expect the government to supply
> health care, educate me (um, ever heard of public education, or are you one
> of those "libertarian" idiots who doesn't believe in public education, and
> that poor people don't deserve it?),

I believe that having public education so controlled on a federal level, and
with such a heavy influence from the teachers' unions, has ruined what was
traditionally and historically a quality system

> and to provide unemployment benefits.
> I also fully support social security and medicare/medicaid. I suppose
> you're one of those "politically incorrect" idiots who believes in anarchy
> and self-reliance while with the same hand, greedily reaching out to the
> government's hand at every turn.

I strongly believe in "self-reliance" - and in my entire life, I do not know of a
single instance where I, nor any member of my family, has resorted to the
taxpayers in time of need. And we are not "wealthy." My parents did not
even attend college. They grew up during the Depression and WWII -
when people learned to rely on themselves. My dad repaired everything
around the house himself, from hairdryers, to TVs, to cars. And my mom
would even frequently make and sew our clothes.

> Do you enjoy the roads you drive on? And
> for that matter, do you appreciate paying *only* $4 for gasoline, because if
> the government didn't interfere, you'd be paying at least 4x that?

I would rather the government, both state and local, would work to eliminate
the excessive taxes placed upon gasoline. And I would like our nation to
begin increasing production, by increasing drilling, and expanding our
refining capacity.

> Do you
> enjoy having clean water in your tap? Do you enjoy the fact that employers
> can't use your health records as a determining factor in whether or not
> you're hired somewhere?

It is this same "government" which has given us such a system of excessive
"records." The cleanest tap water I have ever enjoyed, was in rural areas,
with little to no government "intervention" in the water The water from my
grandparent's well, even though it contained visible dirt and other "nasties" -
was like nectar from the gods.

> Do you utilize public parks?

Believe it or not, I have not visited in *public* park in decades. Plenty of
private parks have entertained me, though. Cantigny Park outside
of Chicago is a "must-visit" - far cleaner, more beautiful, and more visitor-
friendly than any public park.

> Do you have a social
> security number, or a bank account? Do you benefit from quality standards
> in the food you eat at restaurants or buy in your local grocer? Are you
> married? Did you spend your stimulus check (or did you donate it all to Ron
> Paul)?

My bank accounts are matters between myself and my financial institution.
The government has no business even knowing about them, let alone the details.
We rarely eat out, as we feel restaurants charge way too much for what one receives.
I care little about "quality standards" in what I buy...as I am able enough to
determine this on my own. My stimulus check? I invested it wisely. And I never
supported Mr. Paul. My support went to Mr. Huckabee, because of his support for
the FairTax.

> As I mentioned before, did you go to a pubic school?

Yes...back when the "three r's" were "reading and 'riting and 'rithmetic" -
as opposed to today's "racism and reproduction and recycling."
It was in the days when discipline was still instilled and expected,
and there were no drugs, crime, guns, teen pregnancies, etc., in school.
(Ironically, there were also *not* "counselors" nor "psychologists" in
schools, nor the multi-tiered layers of "management" - there must be
a correlation...)

> Do you
> appreciate environmental standards, so that corporations can't (at least in
> theory) wantonly destroy every inch of this planet with pollution? Have you
> never called, or needed, the police for anything ever in your life?
>

Honestly, I have never had to call the police for anything. As far as the cliched
remarks about corporarations destroying the environment...*yawn*.
Have you seen the Dell Diamond after the State UIL Championships are
held there, and attended by high-schoolers from all over Texas? The most
primitive Eastern-European coal-fired plant couldn't produce as much filth.
And when it is over...the fine staff at The Dell has the place spotless and
pristine in no time at all. Let's see "the city" do that.

> What about my responsibility to behave in a civil manner, and trust that the
> laws that have been set up to not only protect me, but to protect animals,
> will be enforced? Do you really want to live in a society where no one is
> obligated to follow any rules, and everyone can just go about smashing up
> other people's cars because they want to?

Did I suggest you "smash up" the car in question? No. Were any of my
suggestions "un-civil?" No. And there are laws in place that enable common
citizens to legally handle such matters, so that one does not have to rely
on the police or other agencies.

> If someone rear-ended you in a
> vehicle, would you get out and immediately start beating them to a pulp, or
> would you call the cops?

I would exchange insurance information. I would photograph the scene's
details with the camera I always keep handy. Immediately calling the police is
not a requirement, as situations vary depending on where an accident occurs.

> Well, it sounds to me like you might do the
> former, but I don't want to pass judgment. I'm sorry if I believe that laws
> and civil behavior standards are in place for a reason. I know there are
> instances where they can, and should, be violated, but I wasn't there yet in
> this particular situation.
>

And nothing I suggested was "against the law."

> So take your self-righteous, blow-hard bullshit, and fuck off. Better yet,
> go back to keeping your head buried in the sand and ignoring reality, and
> stop sending out such stupid emails. What are you, some undergrad college
> radical at Berkeley, living off your trust fund while at the same time
> chanting "down with the government" or something?
>

No. I have never even visited Berkeley. I am a conservative-libertarian
Southerner, born in Alabama, and have resided in Texas since 1973.
I have never had a "run in" with the law, never have been drunk, and have
never even *seen* any type of "illegal drug" let alone imbibe in such.
I was a Cub Scout, Webelo, and Boy Scout. My hobbies include such
things as sculpting and painting historical miniatures and scale models
(specializing in military history), playing Bridge, fishing, and baseball.
I have voted Republican or Libertarian in every election since 1981,
from local to national. So I am the furthest thing from a "Berkeley radical."
I would *never* chant "down with government" - as I support all of
our national endeavors, even when others turn against things such as our
foreign policy. But I *do* look down on people who are so willing
to relinquish their own personal duties and initiative, simply because
there is some government entity that can do, what they can do themselves.

And your own use of the profanity reveals you to be of the all-too-typical
mindset: "I respect all views and opinion except those I don't agree with."
And you also seem to believe that the "private sector" should be
subservient to the "public sector."

--

Greg Heilers
Registered Linux user #328317 - SlackWare 10.2 (2.6.13)
AUS

For a revolutionary email program:
http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/
.....

Gus McCrae: [Coming upon the sodbusters killed by Dan Suggs] I'god, a man could get rich
in the grave digging business around here. Pea, you ought to get a long shovel.

Pea Eye Parker: I don't think I'd want to do that.

Woodrow Call: This is a bad bunch we're after.

Newt: Gus, Jake wouldn't have nothin' to do with something like this!

Gus McCrae: Jake's always been easily led.

-- Larry McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove"

You want a job....?

2008-07-16T06:45:00.001-07:00

People have told me for years (teachers, employers, my parents) that I have an outstanding work ethic. This has always somewhat perplexed me, given that I view myself as lazy, unmotivated and as someone who hates working more than pretty much anything in the world. My ideal job would be to get paid $18 an hour to read the internet and drink coffee and not have to speak to anyone. Whenever I have a job all I do is complain, and I often have a very bad attitude at work, even towards my bosses.

But in the last couple of jobs I've had, some of that praise has started to make sense viewed in the context of comparing me to most other people, who are not only completely incompetent most of the time, but also lack basic personality skills (managing to speak beyond mono-syllables) and often just don't show up for work.

Even in these dire economic times, I've lately been witness to some shocking displays of well, not necessarily incomptence, maybe, but some kind of thoughtlessness. At my place of employment, despite being retail, it's not incredibly easy to get hired. I work primarily at the customer service desk, so I see everyone that comes in the store, and in the last couple of weeks I've had various people come in for interviews, but not know who called them, who they're supposed to interview with, or what time, exactly, they're supposed to be there. Or they show up in flip-flops.

It's kind of extraordinary.

Yesterday this guy came in about 1, and said he had an interview, but he didn't know if it was at 2 or 2:30. Was it a group interview or a one-on-one interview? He wasn't sure, but thought it was the group interview.

So I call the woman who's in charge of those, and she says, "No, there are no group interviews today. Besides, ours are always at 2:30, never at 2."

So I ask the guy who called him about the interview. Naturally, he doesn't remember. I throw out some names. One of them kind of rings a bell, but he's not sure.

So I call upstairs to the operator who's supposed to have a fairly good grasp of what's going on. The guy up there transfers the interviewee to R____, the woman who probably called him, but her voice-mail picks up and the guy leaves a message. I ask who he was transferred to, I say, "Was it R_____?" His reply? "I don't remember."

You don't remember? You just left her a voice-message 20 seconds ago and you already don't remember who it was??

After a few more rounds of calls, and even a call to the south store, which is, in fact, having a group interview that day at 2, but the guy still thinks he's supposed to be at the north store, he finally leaves and says, "Oh well, I guess we'll figure it out later."

Someone else came in the other day (in flip-flops and torn jeans) for an interview that was supposed to be at the south store, and with whom she also couldn't remember. Don't these people write anything down or pay attention to what people who are potentiallly interested in giving them jobs are saying to them?

So yes, I guess compared to people like this (and the examples go far beyond just these two, trust me), I have a pretty good work ethic.

wistful optimism

2008-07-09T11:13:00.000-07:00

I'm feeling a bit out of sorts today. A little depressed, a little regretful, a little hopeful. Sometimes it seems difficult to even sort it all out into anything meaningful, or helpful. But then I have to remember that making it meaningful isn't even what's important. Just feeling it and honoring it is what's important. It doesn't matter what any of it means.

Last night while visiting with Kurt, Meredith and little Noah, we had a brief conversation about what we used to think our lives would be like and how they've actually ended up, at least thus far. naturally it's never what one expects; sometimes it's better, sometimes it's much worse, sometimes it's neither, it's just different. We talked about inner conflict. The way you feel about yourself versus what your life is actually like. I still feel like such a child, so immature, yet I desperately just want to feel like a man, like an adult, like someone that's in control of their life. I want to be a professional, and have a professional life, and feel respectable, and take pride in what I do. And feel secure: physically, financially, emotionally.

My life, I have to say is quite different from what I ever expected. I suppose making a complete 360-degree change when you're 27 from what you'd spent the last 10 years working towards has a tendency to throw one for a loop. And while I'm extremely happy to have landed upon my current path, it's still frustrating sometimes to be around so many people who have so much more of their shit together than I feel like I ever will.

I'm not complaining. I have gobs to be so thankful for in my life right now, and I am, but...I guess I'm just having one of those days.

Today at the library I checked out a book by MFK Fisher, and the very first thing in it is a poem that captures exactly how I feel today.

Why Again

At first, in the immediate impact of grief,
The body lay criss-cross.
The arms were spread out, and the legs stretched.
Gradually the immediate impact of grief grew less.
The legs came up, and crossed at the ankles.
Arms folded softly across the wracked rib cage,
And the abandoned heart softened and came alive again.
The body grew quiescent, receptive,
A chrysalis, not dead
But reviving, curling into a further acceptance of the same
process, the same physical position.

Within, there was still protest.
Why again, asked the vigorous spirit.
This time is surely enough, to be stretched out and pinned,
Pickled in the brine of the spirit.
No, said the spirit.
But the legs straightened and then pulled up,
The wracked arms crossed with gentle resignation over the
breasts,
And the life began to slow to the waiting throb in the ever-
hollowed still soft bosom.

Everything was ready for more.

- St. Helena, California, 1965

Gay Portland

2008-07-03T09:43:00.000-07:00

According to some real estate number crunchers, Portland, Oregon tops the Gay Ghetto list for 2008.

I'm not exactly sure what that means, but the article describes it thusly:

Each year we choose our Gay Ghetto Top 10 by cross-analyzing demographics against real estate sales data to discover those especially prized metropolitan areas throughout the USA that are most in vogue with the diverse GLBT community. When the number crunching is over, we usually have 10 distinct winners, individually ranked by virtue of their popularity.

In case anyone is wondering, Austin came in at #8, which ain't too shabby either. Although I find that prize a litte weird, as Austin has always been known as a really gay city with no real "gay ghetto," meaning no real distinct "gay" neighborhood, you know, with the shops and restaurants and what-not, like Chelsea or Boy's Town. Which I've always sort of liked and disliked about Austin. I like it because I think it speaks to an overall acceptance of and friendliness toward gays all over the city without having to compartmentalize so much. But sometimes you just wanna go where everybody's gay and you can sort of take that for granted. I'm sure that sounds stupid, but that's one thing I sort of miss about living in Dallas. (And that's about the only thing.) Sometimes I think a lack of a distinctive area just leads to a real incoherence of any kind of gay scene, and I do think that's reflected a little bit in Austin.

Anyway, here's what the article says about Portland and Austin, respectively:

Portland Oregon
The “Rose City” boasts a thriving arts scene that ranks among America’s best; and its Hawthorne District is home to one of the most concentrated lesbian communities on the continent. Portland’s Burnside Triangle is a triangular district that underwent a complete renaissance and is now thoroughly established as a GLBT enclave stretching over several energetic city blocks. The influence of Burnside spreads into nearby neighborhoods including the Pearl District (a former industrial section of old Portland that now booms with art and commerce) and the rather upscale and upbeat Northwest neighborhood. Earlier this year, Portland became the largest US City to elect an openly gay mayor, Sam Adams.

Austin
Austin has a long reputation for gay-friendliness, and what was long ago a large gay underground is now a tremendously creative GLBT synergy that permeates the whole city in full view of everyone. Austin is the state capital, an important academic center, and the music industry’s newest crown jewel. Plus the city has a high-tech industry presence only rivaled by Silicon Valley. Austin offers a wide range of GLBT enclaves that are literally all over the map, and Texas is famous for low taxes and high growth.

You know what I hate more than pretty much anything in the whole world?

2008-06-29T21:44:00.000-07:00

Grand Theft Auto IV.

Why I hate the Statesman

2008-06-25T16:52:00.000-07:00

So, they published my letter last week, and despite my emphatic NO when asked if I wanted my email published with it, they published my email address with it. I've received mostly very kind letters in support of my actions, but today I received an email that was so ridiculously stupid that I have to share it with you. Against my better judgment, I also responded, though I probably shouldn't have. Enjoy!

The first email:

Mr. Cox:

I thought it necessary to reply to your editorial letter submission
in the 06/21/2008 Austin-American Statesman.

You seem to be expressing quite a bit of disgust and disappointment
because the government "animal control" people did not reply quick
enough to satisfy you. You then have the audacity to suggest that
the dogs would have perished, if their owner had not shown up
in time.

My question to you: Why did *you* not do anything about the
situation? Why did you sit idly by, and leave it up to "the government?"
If it had been an infant baby instead of dogs...would you have done
*nothing*?

Off the top of my head, I know of four things you could have done, if
you had bothered to take on adult citizen responsibility:

1) You say the incident happened at a local (assumed retail)
establishment. Did you not think to *page* the owner of the vehicle?

2) Did you not think to tap firmly on the car, or step on the bumper
and rock the car, in hopes that a potential armed car alarm might
be activated, and thus alert the owner?

3) You say the windows were cracked, if only a little. Is that not
enough to insert a coat hanger, and unlock the vehicle? (And perhaps
also activating the aforementioned hypothetical alarm.)

4) Could you have inserted something like the spout of a floral
watering cam, and given the thirsty dogs some relief?

It seems that you did absolutely *nothing* to help the dogs, except
for wringing your hands, waiting for someone *else* to do something.
Do you also expect "the government" to provide you with health care,
an education for you or your children, unemployment benefits, etc.
If some "unsavory characters" are creating a terror or nuisance in
your neighborhood, or place of employment, do you just allow it
to continue, until "the government" arrives to do what *you* should
have done - taken an active role in handling the situation?

It is this lazy attitude, and lack of responsibility, that is leading to the
downfall of society...*not* the less-than-punctual response of the
government entities.

Take note of the quote that is appended to my signature.

--

Greg Heilers
Registered Linux user #328317 - SlackWare 10.2 (2.6.13)
AUS

For a revolutionary email program:
http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/
.....

"The most terrifying words in the English language are:
I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

-- Ronald Reagan

And my response:

Even though the clearly snide, condescending and hateful tone of your letter makes me feel like I should do otherwise, I will reply to your accusations. Owing to the fact that the Statesman only allows 150 words to make your point, I couldn't write an essay about it. I only made the comment about the animals dying to drive home a point in my letter.

1. The first thing I did was talk to the GM of my establishment and urge him to page the owner, but he refused. I even argued that a different manager had done it in the past, and the owner had come right out (another car that I reported on a different day). Still, he wouldn't budge.

2. No, I did not think to try to set off an alarm. The establishment is a very large grocery store, so they wouldn't have heard it anyway, and it probably just would have freaked the dogs out, so even if I had thought of that, I probably wouldn't have done it.

3. No, at that point, I was not yet ready to get arrested, fired, and get my organization possibly sued for breaking into someone's car while I was on the clock. If I felt, at that point, that it had been a life or death situation, then yeah, I probably would have, or had the security guard do it, or made a more urgent call to the police. Obviously, you idiot, if it had been a human infant in there, the situation would have been more urgent. (And I don't care what anyone says, a dog is not a child.)

4. When I met with the other 2 women in the lobby of the establishment, we discussed, at length, various ways we could get water into the car, including in the lid of a coffee cup, but due to the fact that the windows were so narrowly cracked, short of sticking a whole hose in the car, nothing would really fit (see #3 above). One of the women threatened to break the window, and I said, "Have at it, I won't stop you."

And yes, in response to your question, I do expect the government to supply health care, educate me (um, ever heard of public education, or are you one of those "libertarian" idiots who doesn't believe in public education, and that poor people don't deserve it?), and to provide unemployment benefits. I also fully support social security and medicare/medicaid. I suppose you're one of those "politically incorrect" idiots who believes in anarchy and self-reliance while with the same hand, greedily reaching out to the government's hand at every turn. Do you enjoy the roads you drive on? And for that matter, do you appreciate paying only $4 for gasoline, because if the government didn't interfere, you'd be paying at least 4x that? Do you enjoy having clean water in your tap? Do you enjoy the fact that employers can't use your health records as a determining factor in whether or not you're hired somewhere? Do you utilize public parks? Do you have a social security number, or a bank account? Do you benefit from quality standards in the food you eat at restaurants or buy in your local grocer? Are you married? Did you spend your stimulus check (or did you donate it all to Ron Paul)? As I mentioned before, did you go to a pubic school? Do you appreciate environmental standards, so that corporations can't (at least in theory) wantonly destroy every inch of this planet with pollution? Have you never called, or needed, the police for anything ever in your life?

What about my responsibility to behave in a civil manner, and trust that the laws that have been set up to not only protect me, but to protect animals, will be enforced? Do you really want to live in a society where no one is obligated to follow any rules, and everyone can just go about smashing up other people's cars because they want to? If someone rear-ended you in a vehicle, would you get out and immediately start beating them to a pulp, or would you call the cops? Well, it sounds to me like you might do the former, but I don't want to pass judgment. I'm sorry if I believe that laws and civil behavior standards are in place for a reason. I know there are instances where they can, and should, be violated, but I wasn't there yet in this particular situation.

So take your self-righteous, blow-hard bullshit, and fuck off. Better yet, go back to keeping your head buried in the sand and ignoring reality, and stop sending out such stupid emails. What are you, some undergrad college radical at Berkeley, living off your trust fund while at the same time chanting "down with the government" or something?

Sincerely,
Mr. Cox

Calling Dr. Freud, calling Dr. Freud!

2008-06-25T09:23:00.000-07:00

I've been having a rash of weird dreams this week, some of them outright nightmares about bearded men in my bedroom lingering in dark corners.

But last night I had a dream that I was hanging out with my friend Bryan, and we were at some suburban Target in the middle of nowhere with....Hillary Clinton! Just the three of us, chilling out, shopping for Hanes and a new blender. Except I was bombarding her with questions about Obama, and what she really thought of him, and the conservative press, and why she said and did some of the things she did. And the really funny part was that it was just like we were great friends: she was answering my questions, and making jokes and I totally loved her! In the dream I was saddened that her political persona was so diametrically opposed to her real person.

Then, inexplicably, we went to one of my ex-boyfriend's houses to watch Dirty Dancing in his bedroom, which was pretty awkward, and I totally didn't want to be there, but we'd gone in Hillary's bus, and I didn't know how to drive it.

Um...anyone...?

Rethinking the Suburbs (again! or, still....)

2008-06-25T08:34:00.000-07:00

The Atlantic article that I posted about back in February is quoted in a NYT article from today, entitled Rethinking the Country Life as Energy Costs Rise. The specific quote is, “Many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s — slums characterized by poverty, crime and decay,” declared Christopher B. Leinberger, an urban land use expert, in a recent essay in The Atlantic Monthly.

The NYT article is one more in a long line of articles recently extrapolating the rising costs of living in suburbia, or exurbia, and how home prices are plummeting. People are realizing that this whole $4 a gallon thing is probably gonna stick around, and only get worse.

Basic household arithmetic appears to be furthering the trend: In 2003, the average suburban household spent $1,422 a year on gasoline, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By April of this year — when gas prices were about $3.60 a gallon— the same household was spending $3,196 a year, more than doubling consumption in dollar terms in less than five years.

...

But life on the edges of suburbia is beginning to feel untenable. Mr. Boyle and his wife must drive nearly an hour to their jobs in the high-tech corridor of southern Denver. With gasoline at more than $4 a gallon, Mr. Boyle recently paid $121 to fill his pickup truck with diesel fuel. In March, the last time he filled his propane tank to heat his spacious house, he paid $566, more than twice the price of 5 years ago.

Though Mr. Boyle finds city life unappealing, it is now up for reconsideration.

...

Juanita Johnson and her husband, both retired Denver schoolteachers, moved here last August, after three decades in the city and a few years in the mountains. They bought a four-bedroom house for $415,000.

Last winter, they spent $3,000 on propane for heat, she said. Suddenly, this seemed like a place to flee. “We’d sell if we could, but we’d lose our shirt,” Ms. Johnson said. Recently she counted 15 sale signs. One home nearby is listed below $400,000.

“I was so glad to get out of the city, the pollution the traffic, the crime,” she said. Now, the suburbs seem mean. “I wouldn’t do this again.”

I guess if you have enough money to buy a $415,000 home and commute, you don't think too much about fuel costs until they're an issue. But I find that so strange. How could you not? It's like when I was watching The Unforeseen, the documentary about growth in Austin, when they talking to the couple who bought the home in a tract subdivision out in the middle of desert nowhere, with fake grass and trees planted everywhere. The couple was shocked when suddenly they were being forced to ration water, not being allowed to water their lawns, and their home values were plummeting.

Oh, really??? What did you expect? I'm not righteously blaming these people necessarily; I understand the desire to own your own home, and it's just not doable in the city for most people. It's sad, though, the position these people have put themselves into.

And speaking of that, one more reason why I'm changing my stance on welfare medicine: the CDC reported today that 8% of Americans now have diabetes. And another roughly 16% have pre-diabetes risk conditions.

I asked a good friend this morning who originally pointed this out to me if my new stance against socialized medicine* made me a Republican, and he said no, it just made me someone who didn't want to have to pay for other people's bad choices.

*I'm not really against socialized medicine per se, just against a welfare system. I think people who take care of themselves and take preventative measures should be rewarded, while those who don't should have to pay for the extra care. As my friend said, he thinks this country knows the difference between someone who gets fat and lazy and eats badly and someone who needs help because they were in a car wreck. Touche.

"Science-fiction known as the Bible."

2008-06-23T10:01:00.000-07:00

George Carlin, R.I.P.

AvP

2008-06-19T21:18:00.000-07:00

Looking for housing in Portland has been an eye-opening experience, but not in the ways you might expect. I understand that Austin is a desirable city with lots to offer: steps away from nature; a local, unique vibe in the culture; lots of art; low crime; a friendly population; overall good weather; beautiful scenery. But let's face it: it's also incredibly overpriced for what you get. Especially considering that as big of a city as it is, there are very limited job opportunities. And now that everyone is converting shitty apartments all over town into overpriced condos, there is swiftly becoming a very shrunken rental market. Gone are the days when you can survive in this town on minimum wage, or even really twice minimum wage.

So I expected Portland to be very expensive and for house-hunting there to be a formidable and frustrating process. It's a coastal city, everybody loves it, they have severe anti-sprawl laws to prevent suburbs and create density. But it seems like a renter's market. I have no idea what it's like to actually try to buy a home there, but renting? It's cheaper than Austin.

In Portland (at least what I've found so far) you can get a 1,000 square foot, 2-bedroom home, with wood floors, huge windows, a yard, right on the bus line, 2 blocks from the MAX (light-rail) line, a block or three from restaurants, coffee shops, bars, grocery stores, and cafes, for about $1,200. And about 2 miles from downtown. (Incidentally, within the downtown area, which encompasses several square miles, all the public transportation is free! Buses and trains.) And that's not rare. Hell, I've found 2-bedroom, corner-unit condos in brand new high-rise buildings downtown for $1,050!

That tells me either that the economy there totally sucks (which may or may not be valid), or these ads are all fakes, like the ones in the back of the Chronicle, where when you call about them the realtor says, "Oh, I just leased that unit literally an hour ago! But I have this other great unit, just a little more expensive....", or it's just a lot cheaper to live there. For whatever reason.

So why is Austin so expensive? There aren't a lot of great jobs. The traffic is wretched. There is no public transportation to speak of. All of about two neighborhoods are walkable, at least as far as anything useful is concerned. And the voters of Travis County just elected Laura Morrison to city council, which means, apparently, that they share her vision of being anti-density, anti-light rail, anti- toll roads, pro-parking lots, pro-sprawl, pro-McMansion Ordinance.

I just don't get it. I was talking to a friend of mine at work who's my age, and grew up in Austin (5th-generation), and he blames a lot of it on out-of-state real estate investors coming in and jacking up the market to be more along California's real estate level. Even though it's totally unwarranted.

I don't really know enough about real estate to agree or disagree, but it makes sense. The market has to be determined by something, and despite what it claims, Austin is very sprawly and big, so it shouldn't cost so fucking much to live here. When I moved here from Dallas, I was in shock when I learned how much apartments rented for here. And that was almost 10 years ago.

I do think Austin is a wonderful city and has a lot to offer (I'd still rather live here than almost anywhere else), but when it comes to its "progressive" reputation, it really has a lot to live up to. And I get more and more scared everyday that it never will. Being progressive is more than shopping at Whole Foods and supporting gay marriage. It's a lifestyle, and a way of thinking about things that looks to the future and tries to create a better world for everybody, not constantly yearning for a past that's gone and sucking as much money as possible out of people just trying to live in a nice place without offering anything in return. I'm pretty sure light rail is officially dead in this town forever. That's really a shame, and really depressing, because the time to build it was about a decade ago.

My friend at work is funny. He's actually moving to London next year because his wife is an art historian or something over there and makes a decent living. So he told me that he's trying to convince himself that Austin totally sucks now and make himself hate it so that it won't be so hard to leave. Maybe in a way that's what I'm doing too. I just don't seem to have any patience left for anything here. But I know the root is just an impatience and excitement to begin my new life. I'm looking forward to it. I am enjoying what time I have left here, though. In the past week, I've been to Barton Springs once and Deep Eddy twice (it would have been Barton all three times, except it's closed on Thursdays. Grrr!!). Just to lay in the sun and soak it all in. I got very sad at Barton Springs on Monday. That place is so incredible, and the people-watching is a riot. I hope someone, somewhere, figures out a way to save this place from itself. I might just want to come back someday.

"Bring it on."

2008-06-19T07:36:00.001-07:00

When gas prices started climbing so swiftly several months ago, I somewhat self-righteously proclaimed, "Bring it on!" to high gas prices. It's going to hurt for awhile, but I think in the long run, high gas prices cn only really bring out positive changes. As it turns out, some website called "Foreign Policy" (linked by Andrew Sullivan) has compiled a list of 5 reasons to love $4 gas. Some of which seem a little dubious, but others (like the mass transit boom) are pretty certifiable.

Along those lines, the Economist this month has an interesting little article about the Brookings Institution declaring Los Angeles the greenest city in the country! Come again?

Los Angeles is, after all, a symbol of environmental degradation. It became car-oriented well before most other cities. “If I lose my car it's like having my legs cut off,” explains the doomed hero of the 1950 film “Sunset Boulevard”. These days the metropolis is renowned for jammed freeways. Talk to the mayor of almost any Western city and they will outline their plans for avoiding Los Angeles' fate.

Brookings's number-crunchers calculated carbon footprints mostly by studying highway traffic and household energy use. They excluded local traffic and industry because the statistics are bad. Top of their green list is Honolulu, in Hawaii, whose residents accounted for 1.36 tons of carbon each in 2005. Los Angeles, at 1.41 tons per person, narrowly beats Portland, Oregon, which is widely proclaimed as an über-green city. New York comes fourth. At the bottom of the table, spewing out more than twice as much carbon per person as Los Angeles, is Lexington, Kentucky.

It's a short article, and interesting, if you're as obssessed with this kind of shit as I am.

10 Years

2008-06-18T21:26:00.000-07:00

Karen's latest blog post made me sad today. Well, sad and happy. It basically says that when she thinks of Austin, she thinks of the home that she, Victor and I shared on 37th street in Hyde Park.

I know what she means. It sounds corny to say, I guess, but that house is deeply symbolic to me. It was the last time everyone was in Austin together. It was the last time we were all single (as in, unmarried). It was the last time we'll have multiple parties in one year, and have everyone we know show up for all of them. It was the home of the last real dance party we had (Halloween, 2003). Which also happened to be the last year there was a Halloween party for which everyone was excited and actually dressed up. Two serious romances were begun in that house. One of which is still thriving, and one of which is...not.

It was just the last time everyone in my circle of friends was all together. As I've said before, probably the biggest regret of my life is never having had that tight, crazy, undergrad college experience. Well, in a way, my early years in Austin I think have stepped up and taken the place of that. Hell, I moved here when I was 21: all of my growing up has been here. All of my biggest mistakes, most painful experiences, and biggest joys have happened here. I would say the years 2001 through 2004 or so were some of the greatest years of my life. I made the friends that I know I will have forever (some before that, and some after, but the bulk was during that time), and I had probably the most fun I've ever had in my life during those years.

Making films, traveling, endless parties, shows of friends' bands, art openings, film screenings, late-night, drunken four-square games, looooong nights at La-La's and the parking lot of the Draughthouse, summer bicycle riding through the city at sunset, a million packs of cigarettes and bottles of Knob Creek. Those years will always be so special and meaningful to me. I've never been more open to things and people and experiences in my entire life, and maybe never will be again.

Life here has been good to me. It's bitch-slapped me into next week a few times as well, but overall, I think Austin will always be my Home.

I can't wait to see Karen next month and stay up all night talking and drinking whiskey and cracking each other up. I love that girl so much it breaks my heart.

You and your letters

2008-06-16T06:52:00.001-07:00

I was the official Cart-Pushing Bitch in the gargantuan parking lot at work yesterday, and around 11:30, I noticed a silver Volkswagen, license plate X62 VZW, with two little dogs locked inside, and the windows only cracked about a half inch. In triple-digit heat!! Naturally I was furious and called the manager, who naturally wouldn't make an announcement, because god forbid we might ruffle the feathers of a single customer, even though it means animals are being tortured.

So I took it upon myself to call 311 and report the car to animal control. Right when I was finished, two more customers walked in the lobby and wanted to also report the car. So one of those ladies called 911.

I wrote up a quick note to stick on the windshield of the car just to, you know, let the owner know they'd been reported to both 911 and animal control, license number and all. I wanted to make the note really nasty, but I kept it to the facts.

About 45(!) minutes later I noticed a lady walk up to the car, read the note, then stand outside the car for another 10 minutes talking on her cell phone. I assumed it was another customer reporting the car a 3rd time, but nope, after leaving the dogs in the car another 10 minutes to talk on the phone, she finally got into the car and drove away.

The real point of this story, though, is that it took animal control over 3 hours to show up. It was almost 3:00 before I saw their little paddy wagon circling the parking lot looking for the car. I didn't say anything to them, but I wanted to go ask them why they even bothered showing up. After 3 hours, if those dogs had still been there, they probably would have been dead already. The women I ran into in the lobby were seriously contemplating busting one of the car's windows to pull the dogs out.

Naturally, being at work, there's no way I could have participated in that business, but I wouldn't have stopped them.

So this morning first thing I got up and fired off two letters, to the Chronicle and the Statesman, complaining about the abysmal animal emergency response. I sure hope the human emergency response if better than that.

Oh, and fucking bitch that left your two cute little dogs in the car, I hope someone locks you in a steam room for 2 hours at the gym tomorrow. I just don't get it. Why would she even bring them with her? Why can't people just leave their dogs at home when it's this hot? Anyone who would do that is mentally ill.

Old habits die hard

2008-06-13T11:23:00.000-07:00

Some people say that in relationships, timing is everything, above all else. I don't completely believe this, but I don't disbelieve it, either. We bring to every relationship we form the sum of all of our experience, along with our current situations. And if we can't imagine our lives having turned out any differently than they are now, most likely it all has to do with one or two decisions we made, perhaps haphazardly or impuslvely, a long time ago.

Which is why "fate" is bullshit. Any of our lives could just as easily have gone a totally different direction if we hadn't ask that person for their phone number, or moved to a different city, or not gone out for drinks one night. It's sort of too overwhelming to think about, but it's something I tend to obssess about. Rather needlessly, of course.

Some very close friends of mine that I respect 100% recently undertook the viewing of Six Feet Under.

Anyone who knows me at all knows that SFU is kind of like my religion. It is what allowed me to be born again. I'll spare you the details (of course, if you've been reading this blog for the past 3 years, you already know the details....), but suffice to say, SFU pretty much ranks right up there with being born as one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. It literally changed my life: it opened up a whole new world to me, and totally altered my philosophy.

But I was also in the deepest, darkest trenches of emotional warfare at the time, fighting a losing battle against enemy insurgents in my brain that wanted to kill me. And SFU was a revelation. Why it was a revelation is too much to get into at the moment, but it was.

And the thing about my friends watching the show is this: they don't really care for it. I haven't discussed it in detail with them because I'm a coward and don't have the stamina for it (and I wouldn't want to put words in their mouths anyway), but I think they find it silly, pretentious and maybe slightly laughable.

Hmmm.

I know I'm overanalyzing here (surprise!), but if they see so very little of what I see when I watch that show, then what can that possibly mean?

Probably very little, actually. It's a fucking TV show.

But it's my TV show!!! It's what inspired me to change my life and become a therapist and go back to school. Hell, it even inspired me to practice a particular kind of therapy.

But maybe....just maybe....

If I saw the show now for the first time, assuming that my life were still in the same place it is now, would it still mean as much to me?

Hard to say, but probably not. I bet I would still like it a whole lot, though. When you find something (or someone) that speaks to you so profoundly, it's impossible to separate that from the circumstances or history.

It just is, it just does. So I can't hardly blame my friends for not seeing in Six Feet Under the same magic that I did: our lives and situations while watching it couldn't be more different. There's nothing more to be read into it than that.

Of course, I still think they're wrong and I still find it disappointing, but there is no deeper meaning than that.

A relationship with a TV show, or any piece of art, can be as complicated (or as simple) as any relationship with a person. It all depends on where you are, where you've been, and where you're going.

Plain as that.

Bored and the City

2008-06-11T08:00:00.001-07:00

I almost started to panic when the opening credits began and Sarah Jessica Parker's nasally little voice started "catching up" the audience on where the characters left off 4 years ago when the show ended. The film whirled through TV clips on the band of a bright pink rollercoaster, while the audience cheered each one, and I knew I was done for. There were two-and-a-half hours left of this? And I just spent $9 on a tiny little martini called "The Miranda?"

Shit. I took another bite of my pizza and settled down into my seat for the long haul.

It's not really that the film was so bad, as just, so....well, unnecessary. 40 minutes in, when the completely contrived climax occurred (which also happened to be the only good part of the movie: where Big stands Carrie up at the altar, which, if you didn't see coming 5 years ago, you were a fool), I was ready to call it a night. Oh, but wait: There are still almost 2 hours left. It was also a little disenheartening, and also somewhat of a relief, to realize, about 2 minutes in, that I just don't care anymore. I have zero emotional investment left in any of those storylines, and that's okay. I especially have little patience left for fashion and shoes, which I never cared about to begin with. The movie, however, is basically just a big, giant commercial. Shameless and dull. I always defended the show when people criticized it for those reasons, and especially for criticizing the implausibility of these women having this much money and spare time. Who cares? That's like saying Superman is unrealistic because he can fly. It completely misses the point. But as I watched the movie, or rather put toothpicks between my eyelids to keep them open, I think I started to see people's points about the sheer shallowness of it all.

About midway through the film I leaned over to Tom and asked how many days we'd been trapped inside the theater.

It's especially sad, I think, to see the things you love destroyed from the inside. I still love the show (I own every season on DVD and still frequently watch the heavily edited re-runs on TV late at night), but it's all a little bit tainted for me now. There is absolutely no reason for this movie to exist except to make money. It adds nothing new to the story, and even worse, the whole damn thing ends exactly where it began! Nothing happened in the entire film! In two-and-a-half hours. We got one good joke made by Samantha that was pretty hilarious, but that's it, really.

Apparently a sequel is already in the works, but I can't for the life of me imagine what on God's earth it could be about. Maybe the homos, which were always treated dismally on the show (and was one reason I actually hated the show for awhile at the beginning), will get to be real people instead of one-note caricatures (and pathetic ones at that) and the movie can be about them.

The best part of the movie though, and worth the price of admission alone, were the legions of young girls (and some old enough to know better) in their mile-high heels and evening gowns, strutting around with their cocktails...at the Alamo Drafthouse on Sunday night..... Afterwards throngs of them posed in group photos in the lobby in front of the film poster, while they had the poor Alamo employees take their photo. One girl, in line for the bathroom afterwards, screeched, "I can't believe Carrie Bradshaw is married!"

Oh dear.

The next night, I was having a little insomnia and decided to flip on the TV for a bit. I happened to catch Inside the Actor's Studio just beginning, and the guest that night was Sarah Jessica Parker.

Man, in combination with that, and hearing her on Fresh Air a couple of years ago, it made me sad that she is the embodiment of Carrie Bradshaw. Despite being the star and philosophical center of the show, she was always my least favorite character, and the one I found least interesting. SJP, as a real person, though, is so unlike Carrie. She's modest, a bit conservative, and smart as a whip.

I wonder what could have been if SJP had injected a little more of herself into the show, and not been such a "character?" But I guess that's not the point. I'll always have my memories, and probably won't be going to see the sequel.

Tagged for Songs

2008-06-09T21:44:00.000-07:00

I was tagged by Bryan. The rules:

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I pretty much only listen to singles and certain songs off records now. I couldn't even tell you the last time I bought a CD, and my musical taste has become very pedestrian.)

"Paper Planes" by M.I.A.
I don't know anything about this song; someone put it on a mix for me recently, and I can't get enough of it. Bryan has some interesting background on it on his list.

"4 Minutes" by Madonna
Whatever. This song is fucking awesome. I love the little horns sample.

"The Greatest" by Cat Power
Used to excellent effect in My blueberry Nights recently, and everytime I listen to it, I get that bittersweet feeling in my gut.

"SOS" by Rihanna
Any song that can get me to actually listen to "Tainted Love" without wanting to shoot myself in the head and jump out a stained-glass window is all right by me.

"The Way I Are" by Timbaland
Rules. End of story.

"Here Comes the Sun Again" by M. Ward
This song just makes me feel good. I love listening to it while I drive with the windows down.

"Breakin' Up" by Rilo Kiley
I've never listened to Rilo Kiley before, but I know I'd like them. Again, this song was on a mix. But it's so damn catchy. I need the record.

I can't tag 7 people without including people Bryan has already tagged, so I'll just do a few: Tom; Ruth; Meredith.

One thing we have George W. Bush to thank for...

2008-06-08T21:03:00.000-07:00

While watching a matinee performance of The Strangers today, one thing that kept going through my mind was how art might change when Obama becomes President. I mean, who knows, the world might still end in 2 years, at the rate it's going now, but I suspect that with such a drastic change in leadership and ideology, the whole culture will shift in one day.

It's pretty common knowledge that pervasive fear, uncertainty, unrest, and anxiety in society make for the best art, generally, and that in times like these, the darkness of people's souls is reflected on screen. Even if the films being created have no bearing, overtly, on reality or politics, they're still reflective of people's anxieties and moods. Remember the Clinton years? How fucking happy and prosperous and hopeful everyone was?

And remember how fucking boring all the movies were? Especially the horror genre. It became self-reflexive, jokey, funny, meaningless. And most decidedly not scary. Who knew that when Scream debuted in 1996, that it would effectively kill an entire genre of film for almost a decade? It's not Scream's fault. The original is actually a pretty great film; I've seen it numerous times. And you can't tell me that the first 10 minutes didn't totally scare the shit out of you. Drew Barrymore, alone in a house at night, being tormented by a psycho in a silly mask: dude, that shit was fucking scary. And then she ate it. The biggest star in the film got eviscerated and (literally) hung out to dry in the first 10 minutes. You knew Craven wasn't pulling any punches with this one.

But while watching The Strangers today, I thought less of Them, which everyone claims it to be a total rip-off of, and a lot more of that first scene in Scream. Which, it seems to me, it shares a lot more in common with.

I enjoyed the hell out of The Strangers, but it's by no means a perfect film. It's predictable, it lost me in a couple of places, due to its slightly meandering nature and the complete implausibility of the protagonists' behavior (I mean, seriously, why didn't they get in the car and leave immediately when it was clear someone was in the house....?), and the abruptness of its ending. It felt less like the killers got bored than the director got bored. The whole "inspired by true events" coupled with FBI statistics at the beginning is just fucking stupid, and the director, in the couple of interviews I've read, seems like kind of a douche. It's bleak. Even too bleak for me, possibly. The best horror films, in my opinion, at least offer a sliver of catharsis, in one way or another. But nope, not The Strangers.

All of which isn't to say that it's not a fucking terrifying film, because it is. Director Bertino has a gift for sound and timing, and hopefully he's not a one-trick pony. But contrary to what some people believe, I think this is a golden age of horror and thrillers. Just in the last couple of years alone, I think some of the best horror films in decades have come out: Hostel (both 1 and 2), The Descent, Cloverfield, 28 Weeks Later. And I'm sure I probably forgot one or two.

War, terrorism, a completely bloodthirsty, bat-shit crazy president, religious fundamentalism trying to run our lives, economic depression, environmental catastrophe. As much as I hate to say it, these are the makings of great horror. I don't know why I love horror films so much. Perhaps The Strangers is brilliant. Perhaps, like Funny Games, except without the sneering condescension, it's telling us that we can't have it both ways: we can't delight in the suffering and terror of our protagonists and get to have some catharsis at the end, too. That's just not fair, and in some ways, it's not moral. We made our decision to pay 8 bucks to watch these poor bastards die, and die is what they will do. It was our choice. We made it happen, now we must live with the weight of our decisions.

But why do we enjoy the process so much, then get so bummed when it ends the only way it could, and how we knew all along it would? And then leave the theater depressed? But...sort of...invigorated....

Maybe it makes us feel alive. Maybe it makes us appreciate that our mountain of school loan debt that keeps us awake at night is nothing compared to having our house invaded by masked psychos that make us watch while our lovers are slowly killed.

Who knows? But if Obama actually manages to make good on any of his promises, I'm going to miss these heady days of horror.

Singing Hallelujah With the Fear in Your Heart

2008-06-04T20:33:00.000-07:00

After a couple of weeks of indecision (and me waiting with baited breath), it's official: another one of my Top 5 Favorite People in the World, Collier, is also moving to Portland in August.

She's going up there in 2 weeks to find us a house to live in. We developed a list of ideal criteria on the phone today.

And also on the Collier news front: She's getting a book published! She sealed the deal with a publisher in New York last week. It's not coming out until 2011, but it's coming out.

So she's going to spend the next year writing said book, in our house, in Portland. While also tending to our garden.

Congratulations Collier!!

Lists into the soul

2008-06-04T11:15:00.000-07:00

Do you think the food you buy says a lot about you? It seems to me that what you eat, and what your politics are probably both say a lot about you, though I'm not sure what it says, exactly. It's weird, though, how many people seem to think their grocery lists reveal too much.

Recently at work, at the end of the night, one of my managers was buying a handfull of stuff. I was off running some in-store errand, and he saw me walking back and said he was going to follow me back to my register, and have me check him out. His reasoning was that he didn't like people asking him questions about what he was buying, and he trusted me not to ask questions.

Huh?

Well, I disappointed him, because he was buying a very unique and odd plant and I made the mistake of asking him about it. Turns out he was buying it as an office-warming gift for his boyfriend's new office, but he jokingly expressed his disapproval at my asking.

Also, in the CD club that I'm in, someone mailed out their monthly CD to everyone with everyone's track listing written on his old grocery lists. Whether it was to save paper or just be unique, I don't know, but on the shared blog we have, someone pointed it out and said something along the lines of, "I feel like I know you so much better now, after reading your delightful shopping list." My first instinctive reaction was that I would never do that, because I don't want everyone to know what I buy at the grocery store, either.

But why not? Is it that personal? Customers often ask me if I judge people by what they buy. I'd never really thought about it, but I guess, yeah, occasionally, but not very often. Only if it's extreme. Like, the people who are always in gym clothes and buy nothing but boxes and boxes and boxes of frozen meals and 400 protein bars and 80 cases of Vitamin Water, and you know that's all they eat. I guess I sort of judge those people. Or just feel empathy for their future doctor bills.

Or the women who attend the Weight Watchers meetings on Tuesday mornings, then go shopping and spend $8 on a box of Weight Watchers brand protein bars, but then also buy 4 boxes of cookies and a bag of bagels. Or 3 pints of ice cream.

But I actually judge people far more harshly by how neurotic they are about how their groceries are bagged, or how many extraneous and totally unnecessary bags they use.

I mean, I'm really neurotic about how my groceries are bagged too, so I always bag them myself. Problem solved.

Does anyone else think their grocery lists are really personal? Do you ever feel embarrassed at the grocery store when you buy certain things? Cuz I do. I'm always embarrassed when I buy soda or potato chips. Or sliced lunch meat. I have no idea why, but for some reason I find buying sliced lunch meat kind of depressing.

I know, I'm a weirdo.

Jinx

2008-06-02T21:13:00.000-07:00

I'm so hesitant to say anything because I'm sure something horrifically unspeakable is just around the corner, but I am so happy right now. For one of the first times in my life, everything is going my way. I actually got something I worked really hard for, and deeply wanted. I feel successful, like I really earned something I care deeply about, and like I'm on a train going in just the perfect direction. I'm so excited to start school and to start training and studying and doing something so meaningful to me that I can barely stand it. The excitement and drama and discovery of a new city awaits me.

Through an unexpected turn of events, it also looks like my dream of living in a tiny house with big windows and a garden in the back, with nearly everything I might need only mere blocks away might come to fruition.

Aside from being a therapist and a teacher, I want to be a prolific gardener so bad I can't stand it. I have this ideal in my head of this person I want to become without being self-righteous and indignant and angry about it. I want to just be it, and be content and loving about it.

Tonight at work I was so bored I made an arbitrary list of what being a good steward and sustainable citizen of the world would look like. For me. I'll never attain it, and probably won't even try that hard with a lot of it, but nevertheless, the list exists and it's something nice to strive towards. If you make your goals so easy to reach that you actually can, what fun is that?

1. Red meat - only twice a month.

2. Farmer's Markets - at least twice a month. No more shopping at profit-driven, lifestyle-selling, elitist supermarkets like Central Market and Whole Foods (this, especially, will never come to pass....).

3. STOP DRIVING!!

4. Stop buying anything new - only second-hand stuff.

5. Stop buying stuff.

6. Get a water filter and never again let a plastic water bottle touch your lips.

7. Flourescent bulbs (so easy, and yet I still haven't done it...).

8. Eat seasonally. As a religion.

9. Grow a goddamn garden already.

10. Learn to cook more stuff, and a wider variety. The freezer should be empty. Except for frozen fruit for smoothies, because that's okay.

I don't know that I've ever felt this at peace with myself, or where my life is at, before. Obviously I still have my doubts, my fears, things I get angry about, my regrets, the past I can't let go of. But that's okay. We all have those to some degree, but I've learned to forgive myself, to stop beating myself up so much, and to accept life as it happens.

This is all very new and strange and weird to me.

If you say, "I told you so," I'll punch you in the nuts

2008-05-30T22:28:00.001-07:00

So, Tom and I tried to go see The Strangers tonight. And by "tried," I mean, we were able to get tickets, but found the circumstances intolerable.

For starters, we went to a mildly suburban theater in a mall. Even though they supposedly advertise that no one under 18 is allowed in the theater after 7pm on Friday or Saturday nights, it's a rule that is either clearly not enforced, or the age should be upped to 25, and even then only open to people who don't pay $9 to sit and talk to their friends.

The theater was full, but not really as bad as you might think. The final straw, really, was the guy sitting next to me, who constantly said things (very out loud) like, "Oh no," "Oh, shit!" and "Damn, girl." That was directed at Liv Tyler.

Before that, however, about 15 minutes into the film, four adults enter with a child in tow, who was probably about 4 years old.

Naturally they sat right in front of us.

I wasted about 15 seconds before storming out to the concession stand and finding the manager. Our conversation went something like this:

Me: Um, did you know there are people watching The Strangers with little kids? Like, very small children.

Manager: Are they making noise?

I wrinkle my brow at him.

Me: Um...well, there are very small children watching a rated-R horror film. That...doesn't concern you at all?

Manager: Well, are they talking?

Me: Well, yes, it's a small child, sitting right in front of me in a horror movie.

Manager: But is he disturbing you?

I get further confused.

Me: He's saying things like, "Mommy, Mommy," and talking. Out loud. Yes, he's disturbing me.

The manager looks at me blankly.

I stare back at him expectantly (story of my life).

Me: Can anything be done about this?

Manager: I'll go in in a few minutes.

Me: Okay, I'm sitting way up in the back, on the right side if you're-

Manager: I'll just look for you, and then the kid will be in front of you.

Now I stare at him blankly.

Me: Okay. Thank you.

I march back inside and inform Tom that we're giving it 10 more minutes.

After about 10 minutes (and I must say, I was enjoying the film, quite a lot), I stay true to my word and leave. (If you wanna know the truth, the crowd wasn't awful; it was the guy next to me that kept talking out loud that really pushed me over the edge.) I inform the girl at the box office that the crowd is "intolerable" and I want my money back, which is given back.

The End.

Even though I was very excited about this film, after sitting through an incredibly irritating 35 minutes of it, I'm a little less excited to go back and sit through that again, but I shall. It was just getting good when we left.

Everything Begins

2008-05-28T06:44:00.000-07:00

I think it was largely due to waking up at 5:30 yesterday morning and not being able to go back to sleep (despite not having gone to bed until almost 1:30 that morning), but nevertheless, I had knots in my stomach all day yesterday. I don't know that it was just anxiety, necessarily, but something like being a little nervous, on edge.

There is so much to do before mid-August, when I'll head out West. So many decisions to make, and business to take care of. I won't deny that I'm terrified, but I also get a little thrill, a rush of adrenaline, when I think about it too much. And even though it's still almost 3 months away, every moment that I spend with the people I love is that much more poignant and meaningful. I wanna hug everybody and never let go. One of my favorite people in the world is leaving for the summer to visit her mom in California and then go to New York. We're going tubing together today, and to see Sex and the City on Sunday, then she's gone. She even stayed an extra day in order to see the movie. But that's too soon.

And I'm so not prepared.

Today I'm also picking up some boxes to go ahead and start shipping some smaller stuff with Jody, who's leaving next week. Stuff like books, CD's, DVD's, small pieces of furniture that I won't need for the next couple of months. My room will be barren and sad, no longer surrounded by the artifacts of my life for the past 10-15 years.

I don't think I'm really prepared for that, either. It makes it all too real. I don't think I've really admitted how real this is yet. And how fast this summer is going to go.

But I'm not going to spend all this time being morose and pitiful. I'm going to love it, and revel in it, and be so thankful that I am going to be so sad to leave. That's a gift. How many people have as many people in their life capable of completely breaking their heart as I do? Probably not many.

I've decided to cherish that, not lament it.

It's a new chapter. I'm chasing my metaphorical (and maybe literal!) fortune. And chasing myself in a way even I don't completely understand, and maybe never will, but that's okay. Life needs a little mystery.

Something else I've accepted and embraced instead of being so goddamn angry that I don't have all the answers. That was the Old Me.

The New Me craves that mystery, that confusion, that unimportance of "knowing," and understanding. Or maybe I've just accepted the irrelevance of it and made peace with that.

Today I'm thinking about selling my car and a good chunk of my possessions. I want to invest in a good street bike and become one of those biking-nut-pseudo hippy dudes. i am, after all, moving to the most bike friendly city in North America. I have many plans, both physical and mental, for myself.

Who knows what the future holds? But at least I'm embracing it; taking charge, but still letting go. I'm always learning and I can only hope to keep falling down.

The Origin of the Fear of Masks

2008-05-23T10:00:00.000-07:00

Probably no one really knows this about me (well, one person does), but I have an almost paralyzing fear of masks. I don't care what kind of masks they are, I hate them. Santa Claus maks, president masks, anonymous glassy-faced masks, the mask the guy in Halloween wears, whatever. I don't like it. The surest way to freak me out (and get me to possibly hate you) is to stare at me while you're wearing a mask. I have somewhat of a history with masks freaking me out in my life that I'm not going to detail here, but suffice to say, some of my most impressionable moments of being scared out of my mind in childhood involved masks. Both benign and werewolf.

So, while I don't care for Liv Tyler, and I have no idea who Scott Speedman is, but people seem to hate him, and I'm sure it sucks, the trailer for The Strangers really terrifies me. Naturally, I just assumed it was a Funny Games ripoff (and dear god, the only movie I've ever hated more than Funny Games is fucking Salo. Pasolini deserved to be murdered after making that soul-crushing journey to hell). Next on the list would be any Lars von Trier film. That man's not even human.

But I digress. I made the Funny Games - Strangers parallel immediately, but it seems there are some seasoned horror buffs that didn't really pick up on it. But since no one's seen the film, there seems to be some debate as to whether or not it is actually a ripoff of Funny Games, or is just being marketed that way. And while I did despise every moment of Funny Games (well, in all fairness, I didn't finish it; when they blast the little kid's brains all over the wall in front of his mother, I'd had enough), I can appreciate the point it's making. Too bad it's such a condescending, elitist and hypocritical point, but nevertheless, I think it's smart.

But the one thing The Strangers has going for it, for me, is the masks. I have to admit, though I know it will be total tripe, I'll probably see it. Any movie that can genuinely freak me out, I appreciate. And sometimes a silly mask is all it takes.

(As a sidenote, I'm also very excited about Mamma Mia. I can't help it; it looks fun.)

What I learned at Southwestern

2008-05-21T18:44:00.000-07:00

The "panel" on which I sat in my professor's class at Southwestern on Monday ended up being just myself and a woman, a Chicana lesbian professor from St. Edward's. For an hour and a half.

When I was a student at Stedward's, anytime I had to get up in front of my peers (i.e., classmates) to do anything, whether it was a presentation, leading a discussion, debating, whatever, I was always a nervous wreck. I was so afraid of looking stupid or being judged or everyone just thinking I was an idiot. I always conflated this phenomenon in my head with my fervent desire to be a teacher, and have been wondering how in the world I intend to stand up in front of classes every day and teach when I get that nervous.

Well, as it turns out, maybe I have nothing to worry about. On Monday, I was totally at ease. I never got nervous, even as I was sitting in front of the class while the students slowly filed in and got comfy. One by one they entered, and yet, not a raised pulse rate among me.

This didn't even really occur to me until after it was all over. I spoke well; I made them laugh; they asked me questions; I never stumbled over myself; I didn't say anything stupid, or fart. Although I did say "fuck" twice.

But I realized on the way home that I didn't get nervous because I didn't consider those students my peers. I was the "authority," so to speak, and they were there to learn from me, and I was just some dude that came in for a class.

Which gave me a lot more hope for being a great teacher.

Which, by the way, I think I would be.

Before Austin was sliced in half

2008-05-20T07:55:00.000-07:00

The Austin Contrarian linked to an article the other day about how Oklahoma City has decided to re-route its primary highway away from downtown and redevelop that area:

In Oklahoma City, the interstate will be moved five blocks from downtown to an old railroad line. The new 10-lane highway, expected to carry 120,000 vehicles daily, will be placed in a trench so deep that city streets can run atop it, as if the highway weren't there.

The old highway will be converted into a tree-lined boulevard city officials hope will become Oklahoma City's marquee street.

By tearing down the Crosstown Expressway, the city hopes to spur development of 80 city blocks stretching from downtown to the Oklahoma River — an area that contains vacant lots, car repair shops and a few small homes.

"We've always been a good place to live, but we've never had a city we could show off," Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett says. "Moving the expressway makes it possible for a day to come when hundreds or thousands of people will live downtown."

The project will cost $557 million, mostly federal and state funds. The city will pay to spruce up the boulevard, build parks and put a pedestrian bridge over the new below-ground interstate.

The Contrarian goes on to outline all the benefits to Austin if it were ever to decide to get into the 21st century and do the same thing for I-35, a major eyesore and detriment to the city, and what many claim created, and still fosters, Austin's ridiculous segregation and racial inequality.

If you want an idea of what Austin looked like pre-35, or what it could maybe look like again someday, check out these photos of East Avenue, which was destroyed to create I-35 (it's shocking sometimes, isn't it, to look backwards and wonder how people could have possibly thought certain things were a good idea...?):

File Under: Duh

2008-05-14T14:54:00.000-07:00

Guess what? Girls, both gay and straight, love gay porn.

And speaking of gender, plenty of lesbians identify with various forms of masculinity: Their own gender expression may be at the masculine end of the spectrum, or they may like to fantasize and play with gender and sex. Gay porn gives them a range of masculine desires to relate to or lust after. For those dykes who themselves identify as fag—or who like butch/butch, boi/boi, or transman/transman sex—they can see a hyper-masculine version of their own sex lives and/or fantasies performed on the small screen.

The phenomenon of straight women who love gay male porn has been documented and was discussed plenty when flocks of females gushed over Brokeback Mountain. When women came out of their fag-loving closet, it illustrated the flip side of a common theory: Plenty of straight men love girl/girl porn because they want to see lots of who they lust after. The same is true for het women: They like to look at hot naked men fucking, and it doesn't really matter that they're fucking each other. I think it may also be true that while pornos full of romance and mood lighting are marketed to women, some prefer a sweaty, get-right-down-to-it romp in the locker room any day. Wired.com columnist Regina Lynn, author of Sexier Sex: Lessons from the Brave New Sexual Frontier, writes that it's not always about identifying with someone in a scene: "For me, gay porn has always been arousing because of its masculinity. The strength and power, plus the double dose of raw male drive and sexuality, add up to more than the sum of their parts."

I've never been on a panel before....

2008-05-14T10:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I received an email from one of my professors who's teaching a Human Sexuality class for a summer session at Southwestern. It's the same class I took last semester at St. Ed's. Anyway, they're putting together another GLBT panel to come speak to the class of undergrads and he wanted to know if I would be interested in representing the "gay male" aspect of the panel. Of course I said yes. He wants me to talk about my coming out experiences and that sort of thing.

I know it probably seems a little passe at this point to have a "gay panel." I mean, doesn't everybody know gay people now? Well, one would think, but especially with young people, and especially in Texas, I don't think that's the case. I heard some antecdotal stories last night about some UT undergrads who clearly knew nothing about real gay people's lives.

It should be fun. And we all know how much I love to talk about myself, so it's perfect.

Now you must suffer with me

2008-05-12T19:35:00.000-07:00

On the day of our final, my science teacher showed us some videos to relax us a bit, one of which has been stuck in my head for, like, 2 weeks now. And apparently my professor's 4-year-old loves them.

Hippo and Dog

Hippo fart annoys Dog

And last, but not least, the creepy German Gummy Bear (also comes in Spanish, French, Swedish and Slovak, but I think I like the German one the best, because German is inherently funny):

Good luck getting it out of your head if you watch it.

Runner's High

2008-05-12T09:16:00.000-07:00

Despite liking the store overall, I have some serious issues with my employer. For what they claim to be, they certainly have no standards for what they will or won't sell, including processed products loaded with high fructose corn syrup, MSG, chemical preservatives, and hydrogenated fats. You also can't get locally grown, grass-fed beef there. Or grass-fed beef at all.

In a meeting the other day though, our GM made several announcements concerning some decisions they'd made. For one, he said, and this was a big one, they are going to seriously cut back on the amount of bottled water they sell. He said (and I'm paphrasing) that it just didn't make sense to import water from Brazil, or New Zealand, or Fiji, when it consumed so much fuel and the manufacturing of bottled water was in itself so wasteful (in case you didn't know, it takes three times the amount of water that's in a bottle to create each bottle, not to mention the petroleum used to make the bottles and then the subsequent waste). The "house brand" water they sell there, incidentally, is bottled in New Zealand, so it makes me wonder if they're going to discontinue the house brand or just start bottling it somewhere else.

The other major announcement he made was that the company is going to start specializing in a lot more seasonal, locally-grown produce instead of importing so much of it from Mexico and South America.

Which made my little heart bounce with joy. Of course, the cynical side of me knows that they're only doing these things because fuel is so expensive (the GM even admitted that) and not out of any kind of obligation to local farmers, but I'll take it where I can get it.

And this, my friends, is why I think the rising gas prices are a good thing. If even huge $3 billion corporations are feeling that much pinch from gas that's not even $4 a gallon yet (and really, that's small potatoes compared to what most of Europe pays for gas), imagine what will happen when it reaches $5 or $6. At least a few people are starting to think ahead.

I think it's really idiotic to hear Clinton and McCain talk about a summer gas tax holiday out of one side of their mouths, then talk about the need to invest in other fuel sources out of the other. Not to mention that once the "holiday" is over, prices are going to go up even higher than they are now to compensate for the lost revenue over the summer. The only thing that's going to make people take a gas shortage seriously is.... a gas shortage! If that's what it takes to start making out economies more locally-based, I'm all for it. I'm fortunate to live in an urban area with a lot of stuff at my disposal (including public transportation, such as it is...) and I know that. Not everyone's so lucky. And that sucks. But I've never quite understood why we put so much emphasis on people's comfort and jobs or whatever, over environmental health. It just doesn't make any sense.

On another note, I started running again this morning, and I really got that light-headed runner's high. It was pretty great. Last time I ran regularly I was still smoking heavily and was most likely not getting the oxygen I needed. Well, I'm sure I was this time. And I only plan on running once, maybe twice a week, not three times a week like last time when I lost so much weight so quickly and got really freaked out. I also wasn't eating enough back then.

My legs are a little wobbly right now but it feels really good.

Michael Pollan on Nightline

2008-05-09T12:28:00.000-07:00

Well, since I can't figure out how to embed the fucking video, here's the link.

He's awesome.

Learning to think....?

2008-05-09T09:01:00.000-07:00

In the June issue of the Atlantic (which unfortunately isn't online yet, so I can't link to it), there's an article by "Professor X" who teaches English Comp at a private college, and a community college in the Northeast (both, of course, unnamed, though I'd love to know what the private college is). The gist of the article is that he teaches English Comp to adults, many of whom have been in the workforce for 20 years or more, who need some college credits to either move ahead in their current jobs, or their jobs are requiring them to take some Comp classes. A lot of them are even public service jobs, like sheriffs, or they're insurance billers, whose employers have decided these people need to learn how to write research papers for some reason.

It's a "college of last resort," according to Professor X, and many of these people, he says, are completely incapable of doing high school work, much less college work. A big part of his job involves failing hardworking individuals who have to take his class 2 or 3 times sometimes, but who nevertheless cannot construct a coherent sentence to save their lives.

One example he gives is of "Ms. L," a middle-aged woman he had to fail, and one of the few instances where he lost sleep over it, and briefly considered passing her for her own sake, but then decided against it. She was supposed to write a research paper on an historical controversy, but had never even sat in front of a computer, much less done research and written a paper. After sifting through several topics, she settled on gun control, though the professor warned her it could not be a paper about the pros and cons of gun control, but could be a paper about the historical significance of perhaps a specific piece of gun control legislation.

Needless to say, the paper she turned in was a discussion of the pros and cons of gun control. At least, I think that was the subject. There was no real thesis. The paper often lapsed into incoherence. Sentences broke off in the middle of a line and resumed on the next one, with the first word inappropriately capitalized. There was some wavering between single-and double-spacing. She did quote articles, but cited only databases-where were the journals themselves? The paper was also too short: a bad job and such small portions.

The professor basically goes on to say that some people simply aren't cut out to go to college, despite the elitism and snobbery that reeks of. He of course cites the British system, briefly, of its tracks of college or apprenticeship, which I, personally, believe isn't such a terrible thing.

It's so hard, though, for me to put myself in the position of these people. Reading, analysis, literature and writing have always been second-nature to me. But I'm terrible, terrible at math. In my Statistics class, I studied and studied and struggled and struggled, and still barely eeked out a C, but I know many people for whom doing math is like breathing. So who am I to judge? But I also don't think that I just "can't do" math. I think a lot of it is conditioning. I think a lot of it is learned experience, from having done so poorly at math my whole life simply because I wasn't interested in it, and therefor didn't really try, but it set in motion a path for failure. I convinced myself that I just wasn't a "math person," but that's ridiculous.

I have very mixed feelings about academia. I think it serves a valuable purpose, but not what most people might think, and not for everyone. The primary thing I finally learned in college (at St. Edward's; I can't really say I learned much of anything at the University of Arkansas or at the Art Institute, but again, that's my own fault) was how to think and express myself critically, which is not something I think I had a firm grasp on before I started school. I learned nothing, really, of facts, or from multiple-choice tests given by lazy professors, because I barely cracked open a textbook in my entire school career (despite paying hundreds of dollars for them). The only thing I ever learned came from doing research papers, and it was a gradual and continuous process. I really don't believe anyone can learn to write in one class; that's absurd. Perhaps someone can be given an appreciation of learning, and then go seek their own knowledge from one class, but again, it's doubtful. I had approximately 4 or 5 classes in over two years at St. Edward's where I thought the teachers did an outstanding job of actually teaching, and encouraging the students to think outside their own comfort zones and come to appreciate the art of questioning and seeking truth, futile as it might sometimes be, for its own sake, and not for the sake of memorizing useless facts for a final. And considering that I plan to enter a profession that involves a whole lot of thinking, introspection, seeking, and analysis, that worked out well, for the most part.

But I, and Professor X, acknowledge that's not for everyone, nor should it be. He writes:

America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting anyone's options. Telling someone that college is not for him seems harsh and classist and British, as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines. I sympathize with this stance; I subscribe to the American ideal. Unfortunately, it is with me and my red pen that that ideal crashes and burns.

For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.

I am the man who has to lower the hammer.

Hopefully he won't mind my telling this story, such as it is....

2008-05-08T11:42:00.000-07:00

Last night, whilst deeply sleeping in the wee hours, Tom, apparently, in some sort of half-awake, half-asleep, dream-like state, had a holy vision of myself, standing next to his bed, urinating on his bookshelf in the dark.

"Ryan!!!" he cried out, in shock and disbelief.

Seeing as how I was actually peacefully asleep in bed, next to him, and not, as he believed, urinating on his bookshelf, at his exclamation, I shot up, my heart racing, immediately ready to react to some sort of emergency.

At this, Tom was now fully awake, and confused, as was I, but only for about half a second, after which I promptly fell back to deep sleep.

After breakfast this morning, I was informed that my startled reaction also elicited a gaseous expulsion of Biblical proportions from my butt.

Of which I was completely unaware since I was already asleep again.

The End.

Things amusing me today

2008-05-06T20:52:00.000-07:00

- Really young, athletic, toned, beautiful people having obviously just come from the gym practically fighting each other for parking spaces in the lot where I work that are close to the door. Or otherwise just sitting there idling in their giant SUV's waiting for someone to pull out of a space that's about 5 spaces closer than the empty one.

- The fact that Hillary Clinton's campaign is over.

- "Paper Planes" by M.I.A.

- I spent three days with my family and only really got irritated, like, once. In fact, I had some of the most fun I've had in ages. Especially with my brother, who I hardly ever get to hang out with. He loved going out drinking, and meeting my friends. He really, really, really wants to come back and visit again already.

- I don't have any more homework. Ever. At least until I go back to school. Assuming any grad school ever accepts me. But that will all be at least profession-related homework.

- I have a new record player and I love record shopping!

- Finding copies of books (on my own bookshelf!) I want and didn't realize I owned.

- "Stimulus" checks.

- My best friends coming to visit me at my miserable job.

- I'm not depressed yet from having graduated. (Give it another couple hours.)

- I have ideas for 3 different novellas I want to write. I'm just aiming for novellas because I'm not sure I can actually write a whole novel. Besides, a novellas are good for people with short attention spans. Like me.

- This performance video of Dolly Parton performing one of the most fucked up songs ever written. I was already familiar with the song, but I played it for Tom last night and it literally left him speechless.

- And along those lines, this really hot cover of "Jolene" by the White Stripes:

Take This Ball and Chain

2008-04-30T20:51:00.000-07:00

One of my coworkers, who goes by the name Miss Lauren Marie, and is the singer for a country/rockabilly-type band, told me the other day that she just booked a West Coast tour opening up for Mike Ness.

Anyone who knows me at all knows that I used to in love with Mike Ness! He was my first post-teeny-bopper crush (George Michael was really my first crush ever), and I got really into Social Distortion in 9th grade, when all I listened to was showtunes. And Social D.

For years afterward, I got so hot for guys with tattoos. Bonus points if they also wore a lot of eyeliner and had bad teeth or a gravelly voice. I started smoking in college because I wanted to ruin my voice and make it sound like Kurt Cobain.

I saw Social D. live at least 3 times in high school and college (or maybe it was just college), and decided I, too, someday wanted tattoo sleeves.

Yes. Sleeves. On me.

After Mike Ness my big crush was Tim Armstrong of Rancid.

Oh, boy, I had it bad for him. Skinny, painted-on pants, the sinewy guitar-playing arms, the attitude, the voice. I also held on to the delusion for years that I was punk rock.

To this day, I still have a soft spot in my heart for the ugly, tattooed, skinny, punk rock boys who smoke too much. Or stocky ones (a la Ness). I met him once, after a show in Dallas, and all I could mutter was that he was awesome. He said "Thank you." I've never been very graceful around celebrities. Have I ever told my story about going backstage after an Imperial Teen show and making a complete idiot out of myself? I haven't? Well, there's a reason for that.

So while I got excited for my co-worker because it's kind of a break for her, I only fondly remembered my past loves. I told her to tell Mike Ness that it was he who was my first love and that in 9th grade I stole my brother's copy of Social Distortion and listened to nothing but that and Andrew Lloyd Webber soundtracks for, like, a year. But I eventually got all the records, and even bought that atrocious documentary Another State of Mind (which I still have).

I'm sure she won't remember to tell him, but maybe she will and he'll find it amusing. That's all I hope.

City Council

2008-04-26T18:03:00.000-07:00

For the first time this year, I've decided to really pay attention to City Council and do my homework and actually go vote. I care a great deal about the decisons our city's leaders make about its future, and I care an even greater deal about how those decisions are going to impact my life. It seems this year that density, public transportation and creating a truly "green city" (whatever that really means) are the hot topics.

So, after doing a fair amount of researching interviews, endorsements, my own memories of past city issues, and their own web pages, I've made a list of who I will be voting for and why.

Place 1: Lee Leffingwell
Jason Meeker seems like kind of a douche, and Alan Demling actually seems kinda rad, but ultimately, he's only lived in Austin for 4 years, feels like the "weird, hippy" candidate, and is mostly known for having a big ole beard. He's a big bicycler and wants to create bike highways all over town to actually make it feasible for people to commute to work, not just bike recreationally, and wants to follow the example of European cities and install hundreds of bike rental stations all over Austin. Which I heartily endorse. But that's about all he's got.

Leffingwell's pet issues are water conservation, plastic bag banning, mental care services, disallowing economic incentives for big box retail, and creating more transparency at city hall. He wants to create a "zero waste" city, expand sidewalks and bike lanes, and create a downtown circulator train, in addition to expanded and more frequent bus routes. He cites that Austin is now bigger than D.C., Boston, Atlana, Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco, and the population is expected to double in the next 20 years. He wants to help lead Austin growth in a way that's smart, dense, preserves character and environment, and he's served on the council for 3 years now.

Place 3: Randi Shade
Jennifer Kim holds the current spot, but she's been very controversial, despite advocating for the poor and for neighborhood character. She's given some really dumb answers in interviews, and doesn't get along particularly well with other council members, often switching her vote at the last minute and generally being unreliable.

Randi is a big environmentalist, with a long history of running non-profits benefitting the very poor. She has good ideas about how to deal with traffic (aka, land use), and supports neighborhood density, particularly along high-traffic corridors (although, to be fair, I'm not sure anyone really opposes this, or would admit to it, except maybe Laura Morrison). She doesn't support toll roads, though, which makes me a little nervous, and says she would only vote for them as a last resort. Hmmm. I'll let that one slide, and hopefully it won't come back to bite me.

Place 4: Cid Galindo
He is the only person running for any position that has actually laid out concrete and detailed plans for relieving traffic congestion and creating more walkable neighborhoods and implementing better public transportation. His plan was presented at, and approved by, the Congress for New Urbanism conference that was held in Austin about 3 weeks back. It basically consists of creating 7 different "hubs" or downtown-type centers, around Austin, that would all be walkable, dense neighborhoods, each served by public transportation within and linking them. It grows the city primarily east, to avoid building any more upon the watershed zones west of the city. It has nearly unanimous approval.

Robin Cravey is pretty awesome too, but he just doesn't have the spunk and ideas of Cid Galindo. He's a rabid environmentalist, with a long history of serving Austin well, and it's too bad that they can't both be in different races, instead of competing against each other. A vote for Laura Morrison is a vote for the suburbs and moneyed interest in West Austin and Hyde Park who don't want to see their neighborhoods change anymore. Which means they want no more growth or density in their neighborhoods, and only the construction of single-family homes and McMansions.

If we could survive another 4 years....

2008-04-25T09:31:00.000-07:00

From an email written to Andrew Sullivan:

Isn’t it crazy how all the hope you’ve had for your country your whole life can be drained out of you in one primary election cycle? I’m 26 and if this thing takes the turn it looks like it’s going to take, this will be the very last time I submit myself to this. I’m not built for this sort of disappointment. After the last 8 years, I can’t believe we are still trapped in the same gutter of fear and deception.

Maybe everyone was right about Obama. Maybe I have been naïve. The Clintons knew all along it would come to this. Maybe they didn’t expect it now, but they knew they’d have to get the White House this way. They’re just breaking out their General Election game early. And it’s genius. They ARE monsters.

I have to say that I agree, but I also really liked Sullivan's response, which is that when it really comes down to it, Obama isn't any more liberal than Clinton, despite what people think, and that real change, true fundamental, grass-roots change takes a long time. It's an uphill battle, and it's frustrating and full of set-backs.

Maybe I can say this now because it's so doubtful that Clinton will actually get the nomination, but I've reverted back to my original position: if she's the nominee, I refuse to vote for her.

Will not. Can not. She's a narcissitic sociopath who would rather destroy the Democratic Party than lose. I know I'll get shit for this, but I cannot reward her behavior. In fact, I might even think about voting for John McCain just to spite her and teach her a lesson.

Am I completely incorrect and naive to think that if we could actually survive 4 more years of Republican rule that it would absolutely, without a doubt, kill the Republican party for the foreseeable future? In all honesty, I don't think there's any way McCain can win anyway. I think I could probably beat McCain in a general election.

But if it comes down to Clinton v. McCain? I just don't know if I can yet again stomach voting for the lesser of two enormous evils.

I haven't lost hope, it's not in my nature. But it all is extremely painful to me.

Can 400 U.S. cities be wrong?

2008-04-22T19:38:00.000-07:00

Ever since last summer, one of the biggest banes of my existence has been the shopping center next door, and specifically, the use of leaf blowers at the shopping center next door.

At 7am. For an hour.

Last summer and fall, this was happening 2 days a week, on Monday and Friday mornings. Lately, though, it's only been happening on Mondays. But only happening on Mondays is like saying someone comes into your room with a chainsaw and holds it over your bed for an hour, but only on Monday mornings.

It doesn't usually seem to bother my roommate Dylan too much, but more often than not, after angrily trying to get back to sleep for 30 minutes (ear plugs do nothing), I stumble into the kitchen only to find the other roommate, Garrett, already in there, fuming as much as I am.

So yesterday morning, after an already fitful night of sleep, and having absolutely no reason to get up early, I'd finally had enough. It took only 2 Google searches to figure out who owned the property next door. Turns out, Seton Hospital (another issue - I will never, ever, ever live within 40 miles of a hospital ever again, especially the busiest one in the city) owns the property. So I found 3 separate email addresses, addressed a new email to them all, and fired it off.

I was nice enough, but basically stated that it was ridiculously absurd to use leaf blowers in the first place, but to use them at 7am was not only thoughtless, it was downright cruel. And that frankly, it was creating a lot of ill will towards the shopping center in my neighborhood. Which is true.

I received a pretty immediate response from one of the recipients, informing me that Seton only owned the property, but didn't manage it. However, she gave me the name, phone number and email address of who I should talk to about it. Then was even kind enough to forward my email on to said person for me.

Shortly thereafter, I received an email from this person to whom it had been forwarded (Belva is her name) saying that she appreciated my concern and would speak to the landscaping company about trying to at least move the leaf-blowing hour up until 8. (By city law, you can use leaf blowers in Austin between the hours of 7am and 9pm.) She did, however, provide some pretty dubious evidence as to why leaf blowers were necessary on the property:

I can understand your confusion about why leaf blowers are even needed, but please understand that it is necessary to use them particularly at a center such as 26 Doors that has many trees that continually drop their leaves. Our landscapers blow the leaves into the parking lot and bag most of them. We then have sweepers that come through at night and vacuum up the rest. So, they are actually accomplishing something. Otherwise, we would not be able to walk through the center as the leaves would be gathered into tall piles.

I was pretty happy about all of this so I forwarded the email on to my roommate Garrett, because I thought he might be interested. He was overjoyed at my progress, all stemming from one polite email, so he thought he might push it a bit further if he could.

He emailed Belva himself, questioning her justification for the use of leaf blowers at all, which I also really wanted to do, but didn't think I should push my luck. I quote now from Garrett's email:

The neighborhood is dense and diverse. It is filled with students and people who have different work schedules that are
not the traditional 8 to 5. I understand the need for the property to be clean. However, may I suggest the use
of industrial sized push brooms instead of leaf blowers? To me, this would be a true compromise as the
neighbors get their silence in the morning and your property gets the job done that is needed at the time
that is most convenient to you and your workers. I would even buy the brooms necessary for this job because I feel
so strongly this compromise will make everyone the happiest as everyone gets what they want and there is no chance
any more animocity can be spurred on with the work being done in silence at any hour.

Apparently, (and I haven't read the actual email, but Garrett told me about it) this enraged Belva, who shot back that getting rid of leaf blowers would "exponentially" raise the cost of landscaping services and that Garrett had no business trying to dictate how she ran her property.

So, once again, Garrett responded back, genuinely questioning why it would "exponentially" raise landscaping costs, considering you wouldn't have to buy the blowers, you wouldn't have to buy gas for the blowers, you wouldn't have to pay for maintenance on the blowers, and the workers would probably prefer to do without the noise and weight of carrying them around.

No word yet if she responded to this.

I started doing some research though, and discovered that over 400 U.S. cities and towns have either banned, or placed serious restrictions on, leaf blowers, largely due to the noise disturbance they create, but also because they guzzle gas and pollute worse than cars. Arizona and New Jersey have even debated putting statewide bans on them.

Once school is over I'm going to try to make it my mission to get those fuckers banned in Austin. The stupid-ass condos across the street from me use them too. Twice a week in the summer and fall (twice a week!!) they have a landscaping service come in and mow, edge, and leaf-blow for at least an hour and a half in the afternoons. It's so loud in my house when they do that, I can't concentrate on anything. I can't even watch TV. Seriously. That's how loud it all is. I can't read or do homework. Multiple times I've been working on papers or something and had to leave my own house and go somewhere else because their leaf blowers were too loud across the street.

Anybody have any advice as to the best way to approach this kind of stuff with City Council? I'm not fucking around.

Would you live in the world's tallest vibrator?

2008-04-20T20:49:00.000-07:00

At 150 stories tall, including a $40 million penthouse with a view of four states (!!!), the Chicago Spire, when complete, will be the world's tallest residential building, and the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere.

Spanish architect Santiago Calantrava says he was inspired by nature, but I can't think of much else that gets you farther away from nature than being 150 stories up in the air pretending to be God. I hate to be a jerk about a building, but is all this small-dicked, Napoleonic, hubritic exclusivity really necessary? Each unit's front door is going to be custom-designed for god's sake!

Meanwhile, a couple of weeks ago, the Congress for New Urbanism held its annual conference in Austin (I snicker every time I hear "new" urbanism....), and gave an its prestigious Athena Medal award to Austin's own Synclair Black. According to the Chronicle, Over four decades, he's remained tirelessly devoted to inspiring, cajoling, haranguing and goading Austin to embrace better urban design.

In the accompanying article in the Chronicle, they note that he was commissioned to design the vacant lot on north Lamar, between 38th and 45th street, but that the developer didn't comprehend the value of the plan to integrate the residential, shopping, and commercial/medical components to create community synergy. It eliminated almost all traces of the New Urbanist principles, one by one, and instead built a suburban-style project with disconnected shopping, housing, open space, and a hospital. Aka, it became what is now Central Market, with that hideous and foreboding parking lot and dead space.

He also had a plan to sink I-35 and create park space on top of where it now is, but Texas Department of Transportation has no intention to ever do so.

The "sunken" I-35 plan, where local drivers would use handsome new tree-lined boulevards at street level.

And in 1981, apparently he drew up a "master plan" of downtown Austin consisting of incredibly dense 4-6 story buildings, using Barcelona, Washington D.C., and Paris as his models.

Beautiful Barcelona.

Ah, what might have been. If Austin had been forward-thinking enough 30 years ago to have started implementing some of these "new urbanist" ideas, instead of saying "Oh, shit!" and scrambling to save its ass now by building 180-story condos (which, don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of, although I think a more European-style plan, with smaller buildings closer together and much larger sidewalks creates a far more welcoming and vibrant street life), imagine how different and amazing it could probably be today. For one thing, we wouldn't have all these box stores and gigantic parking lots in the central city, and it would probably all have much more of West Campus feel. I drove through West Campus the other night just to check out all the new construction and stuff, and damn, that neighborhood is dense! There's not a square inch there left uncovered. And it's beautiful and really vibrant. Too bad the whole city's not like that.

Anyway, there's a short list of some of Sinclair Black's other architectural plans (most not ever built, sadly) here if you'd like to check them out.

Moldy

2008-04-19T21:23:00.000-07:00

Right now I'm eating a peanut butter sandwich on expensive bread that I bought quite awhile ago and never ate, and I can't decide if the white powder is flour or mold. The expiration date was 4 days ago. I'm also having a glass of milk from a $5 gallon of organic milk that I've only had about half of, and it expires tomorrow. The milk also tastes a little sour. My cat is stalking invisible bugs on my rug.

I can't help but feel all of this is a metaphor for my life.

Today as my cleaning expedition continued I came across a whole cache of notebooks. Some were from school, some were half-hearted journals with, like, 2 pages written in them. One was a dream journal I actually bothered to keep for about an hour. That was fun to read, and I did recall having those dreams as I read about them. But I came across a single sheet of paper I remember filling out, but not why I was filling it out. Was it for school, for therapy?

Not sure.

Anyway, it had some questions, and some answers put down by myself.

Question 1: Best part of being in love?
My response: Realizing that there are people out there I can connect with.

Question 2: Worst part of being in love?
My response: insecurity.

Question 3: What do you let slide?
My response: Indifference.

Question 4: How do you stop taking care of yourself?
My response: I put his emotional needs before mine.

Question 5: Survival Mechanisms?
My responses: ignoring hurts; submitting; making excuses.

Gawd! How depressing. At least I've moved beyond that mind-set a bit, if only a bit. It's funny how your last relationship seems to shape and form every relationship you've ever had (or will ever have!), and suddenly the dynamic of that relationship seems to be the model for all of them. At least until the next one comes along.

Never mind that maybe your dysfunction was just a function of that particular relationship, and his inability to communicate. Or express feelings. Or act remotely interested in anything you had to say. Or be nice.

Yeah, thank God I've moved beyond that. I guess sometimes you have to realize how badly you're being treated by someone you're in love with to realize how well you believe you deserve to be treated.

Tonight I found some little trinket, bead-like things on my windowsill that I've never seen before. I've lived in this room for almost 2 years. They're square and metal and have letters engraved on them.

Weird.

I'm just sitting on the shelf

2008-04-18T09:10:00.001-07:00

Having only 2 weeks of school left (!!), I somehow ended up this week, post-Wednesday, with nary a shred of homework. Nada. Nothing. I turned in the last draft of my thesis this week (well, techincally I have one draft left, but it's done; the last draft is simply a "cleaning up"), turned in some final papers this week, and had homework due on Wednesday.

So I've found myself with some spare time for the first time in 3 months. The first thing that went out the window this semester was my typically impeccable level of tidiness in my bedroom. My bedroom has been a wreck! So I decided this morning to clean it up. Including cleaning out my file drawers full of crap that I've barely looked at in years.

I am not a pack rat. I hate having stuff. Until I'd moved enough times that there was very little left, evey time I moved I'd throw away multiple trash bags full of stuff. Just crap that I'd collected. Some useful, some not. Some sentimental, mostly not. It's weird when I get into these moods to purge: I always fancy myself overly sentimental, but when it comes down to stuff, I'm about as unsentimental as it gets. I can throw almost anything away. Except gifts that were given to me. I can't get rid of those. I actually have a box full of gifts from ex-boyfriends that I either don't care to use (clothing and such), or just don't want sitting around. But I also can't bring myself to just toss, either.

Although sometimes I just want to set fire to the damn thing and be done with it.

But I digress. I like my collections: books, music, films. Although I don't buy films anymore, and rarely buy music anymore, I still buy books. That's pretty much the one thing I have no guilt accumulating. In fact, one day I hope to have a whole house full of books. But as it goes, aside from my couch, everything I own can fit fairly neatly into my little bedroom. (I actually did a big book purge about 4 moves ago, selling a couple of boxes full to Half-Price Books, and I've regretted it ever since.)

I like things that way. When I have too much stuff I feel consumed by it. I feel responsible for it. I get nervous when I go into people's homes who just have stuff everywhere, like a goddamn museum. I guess for some people that's a sign of a full life lived, but I hate it. I have a couple of momentos from foreign countries, but mostly I prefer my memories in words and a few photographs.

There's something I find very romantic about occupying a very small space and utilizing it as efficiently as possible. I love cute little small houses and small apartments (as long as they have natural light, and preferably a little balcony). I guess I've just never understood why so many people wanted to live in the suburbs in big houses, with big rooms, and huge yards, only to then have to fill them up with stuff.

Small spaces make me feel safer, more protected, less separated from the world around me. It's cozy. To me.

Now I must get back to cleaning out my file cabinets. Purging is such a great feeling. I love it.

"Honey, I'm moved."

2008-04-13T21:01:00.000-07:00

I would say last night's little birthday bash was a resounding success. I have a hangover from hell today, combined with an incoming sinus infection. I woke up at 3:30 this a.m., my lips chapped, and my throat sticky and sore. I'm also pretty sure my glands were a bit swollen.

Every time this happens, I'm just positive that I have the AIDS. Never fails. That's the first thing that pops into my head. Swollen glands (although they probably weren't even really swollen; I was just imagining it) and a sore throat (although that's just from sleeping with my mouth open and nasal drip). Mmm...nasal drip.

Then my second thought after that was that I don't think my first drink at the bar was ever paid for. Although much of last night is just a blur, as I was far more drunk than any 31-year-old needs to be. I do vividly remember, however, Laura taking one look at my new haircut and asking me if I was already having a mid-life crisis. Which of course was the funniest thing I'd ever heard, because pretty much everything Laura says is the funniest thing I've ever heard.

In my sexuality class this past week I heard a statistic that was something like, if you've sucked more than 5 dicks in your life, you have a 250% higher chance of getting throat cancer than someone who hasn't sucked 5 dicks.

Which I'm sure is a ridiculous and mostly made-up statistic, but I would really, really love to hear how they came to that conclusion (no pun intended). I mean, if you've only sucked 4 dicks are you still okay, on a throat cancer par, and equal to someone who's never sucked a dick, but then at #5, suddenly you shoot up 250% (again, geez, I'm sorry, no pun intended....)? Why does that fifth dick make all the difference?

These are the things I think about when I wake up at 3:30 in the morning with a sore throat.

Mr. Bush, tear down that wall.

2008-04-10T20:41:00.000-07:00

I've been extremely pissed off about this for the past 9 days. It makes me want to go down to the border and start dynamiting those fucks building that goddamn wall. Or move to Mexico and become a coyote to help people sneak across. I love how conservatives love to yammer on about "small government" and "individual rights" until it comes down to something they care about, then all that stuff goes out the window and the government is free to come in and do whatever it pleases, as long as it fulfills their fucking racist, xenophobic agenda. Oh yeah, that's right, the conservatives only oppose "big government" when it involves liberals doing something that might actually help people.

But when they're ruining people's farms, destroying fragile ecosystems, damaging already economically depressed towns, turning the United States into a hateful, fearsome police state, and possibly tearing people's families apart, that's okay, because it might keep a couple of extra brown people out of the country.

Chertoff has said the fence is good for the environment because immigrants degrade the land with trash and human waste when they sneak illegally into the country.

If that isn't the weakest, most limp-dicked rationale I've ever heard for anything in my life, then somebody shoot me. Are these people seriously running our country? Seriously? God, it's like they're not even trying anymore.

Fuck those fuckers. Nothing could possibly make me more ashamed to live in Texas than a fucking border wall. For Christ's sake. I have to stop now because it makes too depressed to think about it.

"Don't Rest. Don't Stop."

2008-04-10T16:39:00.000-07:00

When Brionne Davis came in and auditioned for my short film black-eyed, I had no clue who he was or where he came from, but he scared the shit out of me.

When he was done auditioning, I was shaky and literally sweating, and I just curtly said thank you and told him he was done. We were all sort of speechless.

But since the role he was auditioning for required him to be a scary, raping psychopath, needless to say, he got the job.

Now it looks as though he's capitalizing on that fear-inducing pathos, because he plays the scary, murderous psychopath in the new Rest Stop sequel. In case you don't know him, or don't recognize him, he's the guy in the plaid shirt, with the trucker cap and moustache (sp?).

And I'm sure he's nothing if not terrifying.

Which is really funny if you know him, because he's one of the most gentle, soft-spoken people you'll ever meet. And his ability to play scary is all the more disarming because he's also really good looking.

Again, needless to say, I'm so excited to see this I could piss my pants. I can't wait!

And Here I Go

2008-04-02T09:33:00.000-07:00

Despite last night's American Idol tribute to Dolly Parton being overall fairly disappointing (she didn't even perform; Martina McBride performed at her tribute night they had a couple of years ago....), it was still lots of fun to watch.

The only performance I really liked was "Jolene" by whoever that girl is that did it, and partly because that's just such a great song. The rest were pretty lifeless, uninspired and didn't much seem to suit the singers performing them.

I was really hoping someone would do "Here You Come Again," which is my all-time favorite Dolly song, and sure enough someone did, but I hated her rendition of it. She turned it from a jangly, fun, sort of wistful pop tune into a boring, mournful ballad to showcase her lackluster voice. Of course, it was astronomically good compared to Clay Aiken's heinously boring and awful version performed at some dedication thing a couple years ago (and sadly, that's probably the only version of that song that last night's performer was familiar with....).

So to cleanse my mental palette, I went online this morning to find an authentic version performed the way it's supposed to be performed. This one's great:

But I'm not drowning....

2008-03-31T20:29:00.000-07:00

Tonight, for my thesis, I interviewed a man named Don who runs this place in Georgetown, offering "freedom from homosexuality through jesus christ" or whatever.

We met at Village Inn, just off Exit 261 in Georgetown, at 8pm.

Little did I know I would be there for 2 hours. After my formal questions, we just had a conversation.

And even littler did I know that I would the find the man totally charming, inoffensive, completely open and genuine, and actually quite relaxing to be around.

I opened up to him, and told him quite a bit about my life, and he told me about his. I mean, duh, naturally he's a great big homo who decided to get married when he was 27 because he needed stability in his life. He's now 50-something with 5 grown kids and claims to be totally happy and content, despite still struggling with temptation. And I only got testy and confrontational with him a couple of times.

My instinct is to mock him, and I do think he's mostly full of shit, but it's shit he genuinely believes. And you know what else? I really liked the guy.

I practically had to pry myself away from him (as in, he wouldn't stop talking, even out in the parking lot when I was trying to walk away), and I got in the car in a really good mood, albeit a bit mystified.

But on the way home, as I replayed bits and pieces of our conversation through my head, I started getting really depressed.

During our conversation I told him how much I resented his saying that "a gay life rarely ever works out for anyone," and his refusal to lay any blame on gay people's dysfunction at the feet of a society that makes little boys (and little dykes) hate and fear themselves if they don't fit the mold 100%. I told him how awful it is that he perpetuates a hateful culture where spiritual fulfillment and sexual fulfillment have to be mutually exclusive.

I felt sad for him. He talked openly about his struggles, even now into his 50's, and how he wished someone had told him when he was in his 20's that it was okay.

Even now, though, thinking about him, I have a renewed spirit. I want to prove him wrong. I can get more pessimistic than anyone I know about love, and men, and fulfillment, but when someone else tells me I'll never have that because of who I inherently am, well, all those negative thoughts I have disappear.

All I see is a sad man who gave up. To each his own. If denying his true spirit and getting married to a woman was the path for him, so be it. I do hope he's happy.

Tomorrow I'm going to interview my old therapist for the opposite side of the argument. We haven't spoken in over 2 years, and I'm really looking forward to seeing him again.

Tomorrow night, American Idol is doing a Dolly Parton tribute night. With Ms. Parton herself in attendance.

If you think I'm not DVR'ing that shit, you're sadly mistaken.

oh god you owe me one more song so I can prove to you that I'm so much better than him

2008-03-30T21:02:00.000-07:00

I came home on Saturday afternoon to get ready for work and when I checked the mail, saw that I had a letter from Wright (the school I interviewed at in Berkeley). My hands trembled as I held the letter and I didn't have the guts to open it. I considered waiting until after work, but then decided work would be interminable if I did that.

So I called my mom and asked if she would open it with me over the phone, which she happily did. Turns out it was a big, fat "NO! We don't want you. Sorry, best of luck." I didn't even make the wait list.

My heart deflated. For several hours, I was so upset I wanted to die. I moped around work, not making eye contact with anyone and contemplated my future in retail and one-room efficiencies until I drank myself to death. I silently fumed and wondered why I never get anything I want, ever, and why everything in the whole world has to be so goddamn hard, and why can't anything ever just be easy? Just once?

But once I got my moping out of my system I faced some reality. One of which is that if I was really honest with myself, I had some serious doubts that Wright was really the place for me. Secondly, doctorate programs are notoriously competitive, fickle and esoteric. Thirdly, I was more angry at myself for not applying to more schools and putting all my eggs in 2 baskets. Fourth, I think I was less upset at not getting in than I was at the prospect of having to be stuck in Austin for another year, and not only that, having to go through all the trouble and expense of applying to more schools.

But I have one more phone interview on Tuesday with Pacific, which was my #1 choice anyway. And the idea of living in Portland is far more appealing to me than the idea of living in Berkeley anyway.

But if I bomb that, then yes, Austin, you have me for another year. Lucky you. And truthfully, it wouldn't kill me to take a year off and just work and try to save some money. In fact, I've already started applying to full-time jobs. Just in case.

There is some degree of humility involved in all of this, though. I remember when I first started therapy, I told my therapist I wanted to go to grad school at Harvard (who the fuck was I kidding....), and of course he saw right through me and knew that I didn't really want to go to grad school at Harvard, I just wanted the validation. And for what? Because in most circles, your educational background is what earns you respect. If I'm still kicking myself for not at least trying to go to Sarah Lawrence, or Vassar, or Brown, or NYU, or wherever, as an undergraduate, well then by god, it's important to me to go to good schools as an adult. I know it's silly, but getting rejected by schools feels to me like being denied admission to exclusive clubs, even after the other members of the club went so far out of their way to make you feel like you belonged, but then shut the door in your face.

Interestingly enough, a Since You Asked column in Salon last week dealt with this very topic, and I think Cary is even more cynical about it than I am:

The Ivy League scions of empire whom you so admire will leave you standing in the snow by the side of the road when the fun is over. You will think there must have been some misunderstanding. But there was no misunderstanding. The car was full of other Ivy Leaguers so they left you in the snow by the side of the road ... like a slave, or a nanny, or a field hand.

Sometimes I just look back at my life and see nothing but failure. Failure to go to the right school; failed job attempts; failed and disastrous relationships; bad credit problems; totally fucking up the only one or two things in my life that I've ever found fulfilling; falling far short of my own (not unreasonable) educational goals while finishing school (i.e., not getting the grades I feel like I should have gotten).

And not getting into the schools I want to go to feels like one more notch on that bedpost of disappointment.

I know I'm being hyperbolic, and as my mom and a wonderful friend both told me last night, it just means that the real, correct decision has yet to present itself, and eventually, I'll be really thankful I didn't get in to Wright. I don't really believe all that mumbo-jumbo about fate, because it implies some kind of universal control over my life of which I'm unaware and that the entire universe isn't just totally random and meaningless, but it sounds nice. And I know I'll end up somewhere, eventually (if not Pacific, then somewhere else next year), and I'll be happy there.

But, still, I have to admit: the rejection stings. And not the least because I know I'm going to be so good at this. It's just a matter of convincing other people of that.

If more evangelicals looked like this guy, perhaps I'd be more interested in actually talking to them instead of just hating them

2008-03-27T19:51:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Merritt is a young spokesman for the Southern Baptist Convention championing a new set of principles for environmental care and concern.

Good for him.

Because of the national press the resolution he co-authored has received, hundreds of prominent Southern Baptists have signed on.

Of course, he graduated with a degree in biology from Falwell's university so he probably doesn't even believe in evolution. That's too bad, because he has a damn nice haircut.

What a waste.

Seems like old times

2008-03-26T20:20:00.001-07:00

Tonight Tom and I were walking south along the Drag about 10:00 when a car full of girls sped by us and one of them leaned out the back window and screamed "Cocksuckers!" and laughed hysterically.

The following conversation went like this:

Tom: That was clever.

Me: That was clever. It's like they know us.

Tom: Maybe it was one of our friends.

The seasons escape you

2008-03-25T18:35:00.000-07:00

Ever since I started delving into psychology scholastically, I've become fascinated with the idea of identity: how it's created, what it means, how your environment or social life affects it. Almost all of the research I've done in school has been about identity and self-perception in one way or another: transexuality (nature v. nurture), how orientation and perception affect romantic relationships, conversion therapy (kind of nature v. nurture again). I even largely chose what grad schools I wanted to go to based on their philosophies of identity and the social realm. I guess a lot of that really cuts to the heart of psychology as a science. A vague and tenuous science, but a science nonetheless.

So I've been thinking a lot about the role that therapy plays in all of that, especially while I've been writing my thesis, and strangely, become more open-minded towards the idea of conversion therapy than I was before I started my research. I mean, I still think the agenda is bullshit, but as a pure science and form of therapeutic treatment, I actually find it really interesting and that proponents make a couple of valid points. But only a couple. It's still not something I would support or advocate, but it has set me thinking.

People go to therapy for all kinds of reasons. Largely, whatever kind of goals you want to achieve determines what kind of therapy you go to. Most people don't put that much thought into it, and the typical therapy client probably wouldn't even be able to tell you that there are multiple schools of therapy for all kinds of different purposes. Most conventional therapists today practice cognitive-behavioral therapy, which is just a short-term exploration of your bad habits and negative thought patterns and concrete actions you can do to change them to improve your life. In a nutshell. For my money, this is the most valid form of therapy, and what I intend to mostly practice myself. I used to be very into this idea of "exploration" and trying to go backwards in one's life and pinpoint exactly where every little thing went wrong and its origin.

Not so much anymore. I think that it can often be valuable to try to unlock some of the mysteries of your subconscious and try to find those blocks you've developed, or why you might always act out in certain ways that are harmful. But it can also just lead you in circles and create a lot more questions than it answers, when what really matters is the here-and-now and how to get your life back on track. CBT is a very pragmatic form of therapy.

So in the last year or so I've taken on a little personal project of my own. I've tried to do my best to feel less. Just in general. I've made it a personal mission to try to dull my emotions, not to the point of apathy or inertia, but just to where I can easily brush them aside if need be.

Sometimes I desperately want to be one of those people that nothing affects. Or maybe just one of those people who can get sad about something, go lay in bed, have a good cry, then be done with it.

Nope, not me. I dwell. And dwell. And dwell. And always imagine the worst case scenario, no matter the scenario.

So I think that was one reason I started drinking so heavily a year or so ago. I just wanted to experience nothingness, I think, without having to do heroin or overdose on Xanax.

But by engaging in this little experiment, am I betraying my true nature or just adapting? Obviously, drinking my feelings into obliteration 5 nights a week isn't adapting, it's just called repressing, and that benefits no one. But I've learned my lesson from that, which is that it just makes everything worse. I get depressed when I get drunk, but for some reason I just kept doing it over and over and over anyway. Maybe so I could blame my awful feelings on the drink, not on the fact that they already existed and I wasn't allowing myself to feel them while sober.

So alcohol is not the key to being comfortably numb. Necessarily. Anyway, I no longer get hysterical, or particularly panic-stricken, or vengefully full of rage. Or even really cry all that much, except in stupid movies. Whether this is a function of 2 years of alcoholism, or maturity, or simply a newfound apathy, I'm not sure. But I will say that it feels better. Feeling less is a good feeling.

But have I really altered my inherent nature? That's hard to say because I don't really know what my inherent nature is, and the answer to that question probably lies somewhere within the answer to the question posed in the preceeding paragraph.

But it's kind of like cognitive-behavioral therapy, I guess. Would an opponent of conversion therapy argue that learning to alter destructive behavior and thought patterns in CBT is just a milder form of what's practiced in conversion therapy?

This is probably a stupid question, and yeah, I guess it is kind of the same thing. It's like how proponents of conversion therapy compare it to drug abuse: you go to rehab to kick drug abuse and if you never, ever use drugs again, you're no longer a drug user, even if you might want to use drugs again at some point but don't. It's a stupid and weak analogy, but might the tendency toward substance abuse be just as strong a drive in a person as sexuality? Maybe, but one (sexuality) is an arguably inborn personality trait, while the other (a propensity toward drug abuse) is a maladaptive, learned behavior.

So we all have our biology that's inescapable. But our reactions to it are not. As a magnet that my mother has hanging on her refrigerator says: "Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it."

So true, Mom, so true.

Dude, nice totally attack some college girl asking you a question.

2008-03-24T20:34:00.000-07:00

I mean, seriously, the Clintons need to be stopped. Bill recently did a roundtable discussion with 4 kids at Smith College, and when one of them grilled him about his passing of the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, he gets incredibly defensive and tries to turn it back around on the student. Quite aggressively, I might add. He even throws in something about "living in the real world."

God, what an ass.

Afternoon (non)delight

2008-03-24T16:18:00.000-07:00

Does anyone else besides me have specific times of day that they just sort of inherently hate? For me, it's the late afternoon/early evening. Between, like, 4pm and dusk is my worst time of day. It's always the time of day I get depressed, or lonely, or really bored. Maybe my grandparents were really on to something when they always took naps this time of day.

The real irony of it is that despite how much I love sunshine and warm weather, I only really hate this time of day during daylight savings time. When we "spring forward" I always kind of dread what I know is coming: more sunlight, longer afternoons, and my afternoons of depression. I don't know why this doesn't affect me in the winter in the same way, but it doesn't. It's almost like reverse SAD. Although I'm not sure either of those really apply when we're talking about winter in Central Texas.

I love the morning, and I love nighttime (for the most part). Another reason I hate daylight savings time is because it's often still dark when I wake up in the mornings, which is never any good. I like to be dragged from bed by the sun (and a strong pot of coffee).

Of course, between 4pm and dusk is also the hottest part of the day, it's the part of the day when traffic is the worst, and it's the part of the day when you start getting tired. So maybe all of those things affect how I feel too. I first really noticed this when I was living in Dallas, and ever since then it's been an issue.

I can't really explain it. But I know at least one other person who feels the same way I do, and often even takes 2 and 3 hour naps this time of day, because she also gets really depressed in the afternoons. We both got kind of excited when we realized that the other one suffered the same affliction.

Extravagant Demolitions

2008-03-17T19:16:00.000-07:00

Urban scientist Mike Davis begins the chapter entitled "Las Vegas Versus Nature" in his depressing, but fascinating, tour through urban renewal and destruction, Dead Cities by pointing out that to make way for the future, Las Vegas blatantly and extravagantly demolishes important pieces of its past. It's urban renewal, Vegas-style. In 1993, the Dunes hotel was blown up, and the dust plume was visible in California. The Sands, of Rat Pack fame, was detonated in 1996. The Hacienda Hotel - on New Year's Eve, 1996.

In greater detail, he extrapolates further as to why Las Vegas, even more than its hideous brethren Los Angeles, represents the very antithesis of smart, thoughtful, humanistic, and sustainable urban planning. It can only represent the end of the line, he basically says, and yet it keeps gobbling up land and resources like the desert parasite that it is. He even contrasts it to the White City of the Chicago World's Fair at the end of 19th century: Las Vegas represents the end the same way the fair was supposed to represent the possibilities of the future.

Each week over 1,000 new residents arrive in Las Vegas, an odd mixture of immigrants seeking jobs and retirees from Southern California seeking gated communities and an escape from the urban turmoil. Per capita, Las Vegas consumes 360 gallons of water per day, compared to L.A.'s 211, or Oakland's 110. 60% of that water use goes to irrigation of lawns and golf courses - in a region of the country that only sees 7 to 8 inches of rainfall per year! Sucking water from nearby Lake Mead has caused groundwater overdrafts that have actually caused ground levels to sink: the Strip, for example, is now several feet lower than it was in 1960, and a few nearby subdivisions have had to be abandoned.

In 1989, the Southern Nevada Water Authority stunned rural Nevadans by laying claim to over 800,000 acre-feet of surface and groundwater rights in 3 neighboring counties, to the degree that a mob of ranchers, miners, farmers, and environmentalists banded together and vowed to blow up any sections of pipeline laid down to steal their water. The Authority has also teamed up with the powerful Metropolitan Water District of Southern California to increase its withdrawal of water from the Colorado River stored in Lake Mead so as to allocate distribution away from agirculture and towards their respective metropolitan regions (which also means hijacking Northern Arizona's water allotment). Meanwhile, large amounts of toxic waste have been found in Lake Mead, and in 1994, 37 people, most of them with AIDS, died from drinking the tap water. The unprecedented growth cannot keep up with water and waste treatment facilities.

In addition, Las Vegas also only gets 4% of its energy from "clean" hydropower: the rest comes from dirty coal-burning plants on the Moapa Indian Reservation and along the Colorado River. LV has the lowest vehicle occupancy rate of any city in the country, in tandem with the "longest per person, per trip, per day ratio." Its smog has already left a cloud over the Grand Canyon. The Lower Colorado River Valley desert landscape has also been seriously degraded and compromised environmentally by its use as a desert base camp of recreation (dune buggies, jet skis, dirt bikes, speed boats) by tourists and weekenders from Vegas, Los Angeles and Phoenix.

The term "urban sprawl" was actually coined by sociologist William Whyte, flying from Los Angeles to San Bernadino and looking out the window at "an unnerving lesson in man's infinite capacity to mess up his environment." Las Vegas is blindly and stupidly following in all of Los Angeles' idiotic footsteps in what not to do, including abdicating a rsponsible water ethic; fragmenting local government and subordinating it to private corporate planning; producing a negligible amount of usable public space; dispersing land use over an unnecessarily enormous area; and embraced the resulting "dictatorship" of the automobile, among other things.

Las Vegas has been diabolically split up into sprawling electoral districts to intentionally weaken the power of minorities and working-class voters. Only one-third of the metropolitan region is actually encompassed within the city limits: the Strip, Convention Center, International Airport, and the U of Nevada LV are all located in an unicorporated township named Paradise. Poverty, unemployment and homelessness are all concentrated within the boundaries of LV and North LV. This more easily centralizes land-use decisions in the hands of gaming corporations and giant residential and commercial-strip developers. Hop-scotch patterns of development with no regulation raise the costs of streets, utilities and schools, while covering up any available public-use land (commons areas) with vacant lots. Compared to the recommended national average minimum of 10 acres of common land for every 1,000 residents in most Eastern and Midwestern cities, LV has only 1.4 acres of commons area for every 1,000 residents.

As a result, sprawl is driving everything, from tourism attractions to gated communities, to the very periphery of the city, encroaching more and more upon the fragile desert landscape. The physical possibilities seem endless, with countless edge cities (including, seriously, gated mansions within larger gated communities, upon artificial lakes and major new resorts) popping up to provide exclusive enclaves and "upscale alternatives for Las Vegas."

No small wonder, writes Davis at the end of the chapter, that Las Vegas, with its obsession with sin and excess, is the manifestation for Satan's earthly capital in Stephen King's novel The Stand. No other city in the American West, he concludes, is as driven by occult forces or as unresponsive to social or natural constraints.

"Friday Night Specials...."?

2008-03-16T20:40:00.000-07:00

Apparently, a former aide to James McGreevey has come forward with assertions that he used to have hot and heavy 3-ways with Gov. McGreevey and his wife before they divorced.

He looks pretty cute, too. And I guess I never noticed that Gov. McGreevey's wife is kinda foxy too! I mean, McGreevey must have a really nice personality, because I'm sorry, he ain't that cute. I mean, he's not a beast, but really, I wouldn't look twice at him on the street.

How do you think it worked? Do you think they took turns with her, or she had a strap-on, they both took turns working over the Guvner?

Okay, sorry. I'm just sort of fascinated as to how two homos would have a 3-way with a woman.

But really, the most baffling part of it all is...why on Earth did they have dinner at T.G.I.Friday's??!?! I mean, that's enough to put anyobody off sex, no matter how attractive the partner....

I mean, open marriages and bisexual 3-ways are one thing. But TGIF? Now that's just tasteless.

I like lists

2008-03-12T19:46:00.000-07:00

I've made a pretty hefty decision in the last couple of days that I am no longer going to apply to any Master's programs. It would be a silly waste of time and money. I know I want to get my Doctorate eventually, so why would I waste an extra year or two and that money in the pursuit of something I won't really even use?

Good question.

But which leaves me in a bit of a lurch. Due to being an extreme slacker last semester (and being very poor...), I only ended up applying to two doctoral programs. One of which I just interviewed at, and the other I was soundly rejected by. There are at least 4 or 5 other programs out there in which I'm interested, but due to aforementioned items (being a poor slacker), I never got around to applying to them. So if I don't get in to Wright, it looks like I won't be going to grad school until fall of 2009, instead of this year.

Which fucking sucks. But it also probably wouldn't kill me to take a year off and chill out and save some money.

So I've decided to make a short list of things I need to accomplish in the near future, whether I go to grad school or not.

Thus:

1. Graduate. With at least 3 A's this semester. I think it's already too late for my science class, but not the other classes.

2. Find a new job, preferably at some kind of health clinic, Planned Parenthood, someting along those lines (anybody know of anything?).

3. Get my bike fixed up and start using it. Often. Instead of driving whenever possible.

4. Eat only grass-fed beef. It is healthy and good for you. If it's not grass-fed, it kills you and kills the earth.

5. Write. All the time. Every day. Start submitting writing to places that might publish it.

6. Write a novella. I'm not going to be so ambitious as to say a novel, but I think a novella is probably doable. This will have to wait until school's over, but it's going to be my summer project. Even if I go to grad school, I'll have a solid 4 months in which to write it. I've already started the outline.

7. Intensely research grants, scholarships, and fellowships, so as to hopefully alleviate some of the financial pain of grad school. And then actually apply for them.

8. Go back to therapy and really start sorting out my internal shit. I'm getting there anyway, but I need therapy. I do. Seriously.

9. Stop watching 3 back-to-back episodes of Will & Grace every night. It's very entertaining, but it's not that good. Especially now, because I've watched it up to the point that Grace left Leo, and she's all sad, and now she and Will are having a baby together and shit. Who cares. I want them to keep being mean, selfish, neurotic, and drinking too much. Otherwise it's not funny. Homos having babies isn't funny. Well, I mean, it sort of is, but not in an intentional way.

10. Once I get out of school, go swimming at least twice a week. Somewhere lovely. Or at Hippie Hollow.

11. Stop being bitter. (See #8.)

12. Get more sleep.

Maybe that is all.

Somehow apropos to San Francisco....

2008-03-11T07:23:00.000-07:00

....is Stuff White People Like. I'm probably late to this party, as usual, but it's funny shit.

The entries on The Wire, Whole Foods, difficult breakups, recycling, bottled water, and knowing what's best for poor people are among my favorites.

If you have, you know, an hour to kill.

Sunny Days

2008-03-09T22:21:00.000-07:00

After a late breakfast this morning (and by "late," I mean at 10:30), Clay and I rented a Zip car and drove to some tourist destinations, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, Coit Tower, Ghirardelli Square, the wharf, and Lombard Street. Clay's only lived here for a few months, so he hadn't been to a few of those places, either, so it was an adventure for both of us.

After we returned the car, we hopped on some bikes (Clay has 2 bikes) and he gave me a ground-level bike tour of a big part of the city. We rode all over the Mission, the Castro (where there were rumors of a staged gay pride parade for the new Gus van Sant movie being filmed, but we didn't see it), Dolores Park (which is in the Castro), Haight-Ashbury, and then the Golden Gate Park. Clay's a pretty experienced urban biker, so I had a little trouble keeping up, and got really freaked out a couple of times in traffic (and he even took it easy on me!), but had a really good time. We did that for about 3 hours, then grabbed some burgers at a little joint in his neighborhood. We crashed around 6:30, when we started drinking and watching TV and are still doing both things.

Today was really fun. San Francisco makes me feel like a square. But I kind of like it.

In Dolores Park

I wore my Werner Herzog t-shirt all day in the hopes that I would run into him at some point and he would see it, but that never happened. Ah well.

San Francisco is windy

2008-03-08T17:49:00.001-08:00

I hate wind. This place is weird.

It feels strangely like Austin, only transplanted from some kind of alternate gay universe. I feel this way sometimes when I'm in New York too: like, I'm not in a real city, I'm in a movie about a city called San Francisco. It's a weird, somewhat disorienting feeling. It's almost like an awareness that people have that they live here, but that it's not real. I know that makes no sense, really, but that's the best I can describe it.

I met up with my friend David yesterday afternoon for coffee. He graduated from St. Edwards last year, and we had a few classes together, but were never really friends. It's a shame, because he's pretty cool, and really sweet, and even older than me (by 3 years)! It would have been nice to have some older-undergrad-commiseration. Anyway, he goes to school out here now, and really likes it, so it was nice to bend his ear a bit about his schooling, the culture shock, how he likes it all. One thing that keeps coming up again and again, and Clay and I talked about this as well, is how much of an identity shift it can sometimes be. Like, David was saying how in Texas, he was considered a total raving, left-wing lunatic, and out here, he feels moderate to slightly conservative, and how much that's affected him. Both Clay and David said that, if anything, it's only strengthened their more moderate convictions, almost as a reactionary measure. Which makes sense. That's why I stopped reading The Nation: because I felt like I was being lectured and talked down to. Thoughtless, knee-jerk liberalism is just as dangerous and stupid as thoughtless, fundamentalist conservatism. In my opinion. Anyway, various interesting conversations have been had about this particular subject since I got here.

So after David and I had coffee, I went with him to Badlands, this bar in the Castro that was having $2 well drink specials (and is decidedly unlike the Dakotas), and met up with some of his school colleagues, which was fun. The bar was noisy and crowded and I was drunk before 7pm, but I had a good time. After he got off work, Clay met us up there as well. By the time we got home, we were both hoarse from shouting. Which I was really afraid would carry over to today, but didn't. Although my throat has been a bit scratchy and sore all day.

As for today, the interview went incredibly well. I won't go into a lot of detail, except to say that my interviewer, apparently, picked my application to come be interviewed largely based on my research interests and papers I'd written. (All of my research papers are listed on my curriculum vitae.)

Particularly my paper about Brenda, from Six Feet Under. My interviewer is a big SFU fan. Big. We spent about the first 5 or 6 minutes talking about that paper and the show itself. Which felt weird, but hey, whatever it takes. She enjoyed my take on it and seemed to genuinely appreciate what it meant to me. But the interview was an hour, and we talked about a lot of stuff, and I feel like I represented myself really well. We had a natural flow to our conversation and fed off of each other pretty well too. It was a conversation more than an interview, really. I liked her a lot. She's a Russian immigrant who works in her practice primarily with other Russian immigrant families, and a lot of kids. She told some interesting stories. The children she works with have seen a lot of violence and internalize it intensely.

The rest of the day was great too. I'm not smitten, but I was very happy to be there. I met several current students, who were all incredibly nice and helpful and talkative, and I enjoyed the panels.

Afterwards I just went and wandered around Berkeley for a bit to see what the place feels like. I really liked it a lot. More than I like San Francisco. I could see myself there pretty easily I think.

Another suitcase in another hall

2008-03-07T14:36:00.000-08:00

It was a rocky start, but I'm in San Francisco. I flew out of Dallas this morning, with every intention of flying into Dallas from Austin last night, but just my luck, Dallas had freak ice storms yesterday and all flights were cancelled. So I hopped in my car around 7 and headed north.

It didn't manage to fuck up until I was about 20 minutes outside Dallas, where it decided to overheat. Nothing actually happened, but I noticed the temperature gauge suddenly quickly climbing. So I pulled over, let it cool for about 20 minutes (which wasn't hard, since it was about 30 degrees, with hurricane force winds), then bought some coolant and filled it up.

Problem solved.

Except for my dumb ass, which, despite driving to Dallas at least 187 times, somehow took a wrong turn/exit/highway something or other, and ended up in some place called Fort Worth.

By the time I realized where I was, I was about an hour past Mandy & Victor's house, so I had to turn around, and a round trip that should have taken no more than 3 hours, ended up taking almost 5. So I arrived around midnight, in time to guzzle some whiskey, get raped by their dog, and then go to bed.

But everything went as planned this morning, and I am now sitting comfortably in Clay's 3rd floor apartment in the Lower Haight, which I just roamed around a bit. I'm exhausted, though, and think I might take a nap. I know that's lame, but I finally ate (at a little sandwich shop called Love & Haight....), and now I just feel worn out. I think I'll just wait for him to get off work and then we can go out.

But SF is beautiful, and I'm excited to see more of it. My interview is in the morning. I'll keep you posted!

A "diva?" Dear god....

2008-03-05T09:17:00.001-08:00

Call it internalized homophobia if you want, but I swear to God, sometimes Im so embarrassed to be gay, it makes me want to go back in the closet.

I'll be honest: I've never understood this obsession with "gay icons" that most gay men (granted, older gay men, not so much younger ones) have. Cher, Madonna, Bette, Kathy Griffin.... Okay, so they're hags, who cares? What have any of them done for me? This is also one reason why I've always been so critical of drag queens, I guess. I mean, whatever, it's fine, but I don't get it.

I understand people need heroes, and people to look up to. But why not look up to people that have actually accomplished something? As for Hillary Clinton, well, that one I don't get at all. She and Mr. Bill are some of the first people in politics to completely sell out their gay supporters when the heat got turned up too high. The gays just like her because she's a woman. I mean, I guess.

The Lone Star State has a sizable gay population, many of them concentrated in Austin, Houston and Dallas. The Stonewall Democrats of Dallas, the state's biggest chapter, endorsed Clinton last month. The group's president, Jesse Garcia, 36, recently penned a pro-Clinton op-ed piece in the Dallas Voice, the state's most-read gay newspaper.

And far from the primped-up, tight-jean-wearing, I'm-eternally-single-and-loving-it vibe of Oak Lawn, the gay neighborhood in Dallas, Friends is a more laid-back, welcoming place full of older, middle-class and mostly coupled-up patrons. Kind of like "Cheers," where everyone knows your name, except they're wearing T-shirts that read "I love Cowboys" and baseball caps from Budweiser with a small rainbow flag. Jokes Bobbie Aldridge, 67, a retired teacher: "This is like a community center. Or a retirement home."

Like most of the patrons here, Aldridge wears a button on her shirt that reads "Out for Hillary."

Maybe this is just a Texas thing. Even the gays in this stupid state are conservative. I also realize that most people aren't single issue voters, but it seems that so many of the gay people I've talked to lately either are single-issue voters (which makes support of her even more perplexing), or they don't pay attention to politics at all. Neither of which is particularly forgivable, especially in a state like Texas, where I think most politicians would rather hang gay people than let them get married.

My Blueberry Nights

2008-03-02T23:05:00.000-08:00

My favorite thing about Wong Kar Wai's films in general is that they're just honest. They're never cynical, or pessimistic, but they also never shy away from the soul-shattering devastation that often accompanies love. Sometimes there isn't a happy ending. Sometimes the girl just leaves to go to California and doesn't come back. Or the man picks the other woman. The end. There is no one else waiting across the street.

But even in the pain, there's always hope. The characters move on. They cry. They suffer. They grow. They clean house. Repeatedly. But his optimism is sincere, and doesn't have the cynical ring to it that so many Hollywood romantic comedies do, where you know that no one involved in the film actually believes in any of it, they're just giving the audience what they think it wants.

My Blueberry Nights is a strange movie. It's probably Wong Kar Wai's most flawed film, but also it might be one of my favorites already. I watched it twice last week, 2 nights in a row, and I haven't stopped thinking about it all weekend. It almost feels like an imitation Kar Wai film, made by somebody who knows what they're doing and knows how to hit all the right notes, but just falls inexplicably short somewhere along the way.

For one, there's some really weird violence in the middle of it that's never really showed up in his films before, and one scene even veers very uncomfortably close to being frighteningly mysogynistic. Is this intentional? Is he trying to play to American sensibilities (or critquing them), or am I just reading too much into it? Both times I watched the film, though, the scene disturbed me. A lot. Not least because you're called to identify so strongly with the perpetrator, and afterwards, no one in the film seems nearly as disturbed by any of it as I was.

But, like all of his films, there's also such a sweet sadness to it. Chan Marshall (aka, Cat Power) makes an all-too-brief cameo, and for some reason the weight of her scene just killed me both times I watched it. Even though nothing really happens in it. It's just about that lost connection, that fire in your heart that slowly dims, but never really goes out.

Which sort of seems to be what the whole film is about. The pain is never denied. But there's a way through it. Sometimes that journey is physical, sometimes it's solely emotional. But there's always a way. Blueberry Nights is a road movie through the terrain of the broken heart, from one side to the other. It's more than a Band-Aid, but it's never fixed, either. It just is what it is. There's always more for you out there, the film says, if you're willing to be brave and embrace it.

Daily Haiku 2

2008-02-29T10:06:00.000-08:00

Hearts are full of love.
New beginnings make fresh hope.
But even bees leave.

What Hillary Clinton would never, ever do -

2008-02-28T12:57:00.000-08:00

- especially in such a hotly contested debate: buy ad time in major gay and lesbian newspapers across Ohio and Texas, making a promise to never compromise on gay right, urge the federal government to overturn the insidious Defense of Marriage Act, and promise to try to overturn "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

Hillary simply doesn't have the balls.

I'm glad Barack does.

This is the ad, and following that, an open letter to the gay community from the Obama campaign.

Open Letter from Barack Obama to the LGBT community

I'm running for President to build an America that lives up to our founding promise of equality for all – a promise that extends to our gay brothers and sisters. It's wrong to have millions of Americans living as second-class citizens in this nation. And I ask for your support in this election so that together we can bring about real change for all LGBT Americans.

Equality is a moral imperative. That's why throughout my career, I have fought to eliminate discrimination against LGBT Americans. In Illinois, I co-sponsored a fully inclusive bill that prohibited discrimination on the basis of both sexual orientation and gender identity, extending protection to the workplace, housing, and places of public accommodation. In the U.S. Senate, I have co-sponsored bills that would equalize tax treatment for same-sex couples and provide benefits to domestic partners of federal employees. And as president, I will place the weight of my administration behind the enactment of the Matthew Shepard Act to outlaw hate crimes and a fully inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act to outlaw workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

As your President, I will use the bully pulpit to urge states to treat same-sex couples with full equality in their family and adoption laws. I personally believe that civil unions represent the best way to secure that equal treatment. But I also believe that the federal government should not stand in the way of states that want to decide on their own how best to pursue equality for gay and lesbian couples — whether that means a domestic partnership, a civil union, or a civil marriage. Unlike Senator Clinton, I support the complete repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) – a position I have held since before arriving in the U.S. Senate. While some say we should repeal only part of the law, I believe we should get rid of that statute altogether. Federal law should not discriminate in any way against gay and lesbian couples, which is precisely what DOMA does. I have also called for us to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and I have worked to improve the Uniting American Families Act so we can afford same-sex couples the same rights and obligations as married couples in our immigration system.

The next president must also address the HIV/AIDS epidemic. When it comes to prevention, we do not have to choose between values and science. While abstinence education should be part of any strategy, we also need to use common sense. We should have age-appropriate sex education that includes information about contraception. We should pass the JUSTICE Act to combat infection within our prison population. And we should lift the federal ban on needle exchange, which could dramatically reduce rates of infection among drug users. In addition, local governments can protect public health by distributing contraceptives.

We also need a president who's willing to confront the stigma – too often tied to homophobia – that continues to surround HIV/AIDS. I confronted this stigma directly in a speech to evangelicals at Rick Warren's Saddleback Church, and will continue to speak out as president. That is where I stand on the major issues of the day. But having the right positions on the issues is only half the battle. The other half is to win broad support for those positions. And winning broad support will require stepping outside our comfort zone. If we want to repeal DOMA, repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and implement fully inclusive laws outlawing hate crimes and discrimination in the workplace, we need to bring the message of LGBT equality to skeptical audiences as well as friendly ones – and that's what I've done throughout my career. I brought this message of inclusiveness to all of America in my keynote address at the 2004 Democratic convention. I talked about the need to fight homophobia when I announced my candidacy for President, and I have been talking about LGBT equality to a number of groups during this campaign – from local LGBT activists to rural farmers to parishioners at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Dr. Martin Luther King once preached.

Just as important, I have been listening to what all Americans have to say. I will never compromise on my commitment to equal rights for all LGBT Americans. But neither will I close my ears to the voices of those who still need to be convinced. That is the work we must do to move forward together. It is difficult. It is challenging. And it is necessary.

Americans are yearning for leadership that can empower us to reach for what we know is possible. I believe that we can achieve the goal of full equality for the millions of LGBT people in this country. To do that, we need leadership that can appeal to the best parts of the human spirit. Join with me, and I will provide that leadership. Together, we will achieve real equality for all Americans, gay and straight alike.

Daily Haiku

2008-02-28T12:52:00.000-08:00

The sky runs with blood.
Wishes for death go unmet.
"Paper or plastic?"

Graduation anxiety

2008-02-27T15:58:00.000-08:00

I had a dream last night that two weeks before graduation, I received a letter from school that they had mistakenly not counted 4 classes on my record that I hadn't actually taken yet, and that I was going to have to stay another semester.

In the dream, I was already committed to grad school, and I had to tell them that I would have to defer my entrance for another year, until Fall 2009, but the school then said the offer was void, and I would have to re-apply.

It was one of those dreams where I woke up and it felt so real, despite how ridiculous it was, that I actually went to my computer to check my record and make sure I am, in fact, graduating in 8 weeks.

I am.