Discrimination.

It's like a hobby, my interest in love relationships. The topic, I mean. I ponder and pontificate about it more than most people, I would guess, and -- after the experience of making Life in a Box, spending 3 years examining, making some sense of, and figuring out how to present narratively my own most significant love relationship -- I think I may have some small wisdom to share on the subject. (But, of course, it's a case of the more you know, the more you find you don't know.)

Last night, I was at the bar I go to, having a conversation with a guy I talk to. He was telling me something about something, and he said, "my buddy, my other half," referring to the man he's been involved with and lived with for many years. I was struck by the word "buddy," and how probably 10 years ago I would have regarded his use of it as a bit pathetic, a vestige of the closet. Or, I would have thought, maybe it's how he refers to his partner when he's in straight male settings where he doesn't feel safe being out. (We say we've come out of the closet, but honestly we're in and out of it all day long.) It would have struck me as a sad word, in the same category as calling a boyfriend "my friend" or the substitution of gender-neutral pronouns -- "they" instead of "he" -- when talking to a co-worker about a date.

But last night it sounded, simply, like the right word. This guy is his buddy, not his lover, not his husband. Guys use the word buddy for a friend they have a deep bond with, a history, maybe someone with whom they're emotionally more open than usual. A guy who knows them better than their other friends. Drinking buddy. Fishing buddy.

Homosexual relationships aren't the same as heterosexual relationships. The reason they aren't the same -- and this is so obvious that I think it gets overlooked -- is that we are of the same sex. And sure there are ways in which we can mimic heterosexual relationships, for altruistic reasons (for instance, to adopt children) or for selfish reasons (to gain acceptance), but by pretending that they are, in fact, the same denigrates homosexual and heterosexual relationships. The people who are fighting for "marriage equity" are saying that there is no difference between them and that the marriage laws are discriminatory. I see good reason to discriminate. I think it's untruthful not to.

I've never felt like the particulars of my life were covered by or included among the outlines we get. I never wanted a job, I never wanted to own a home, never wanted to get married. (That's not strictly true; I have momentarily wanted each of these things, only because I thought they might bring some comfort or security, not because I thought I would flourish in them.) Even if I were heterosexual I would rail against the institutions I rail against now: marriage, the military, academia, private property, the market economy, etc. I used to think homosexual orientation was the cause of being so at odds with the world, but apparently that's not the case since there are so many homos now fighting to be included in that foundational institution of institutions.

I Hate That In the End It Always Comes Down to How Much I Have Invested in People Liking Me.

I read 4 or 5 blogs every day, and another batch of them I read weekly. A few of them are newsy, but most of them are more like mine, just people writing about the little stuff that goes on in their lives.

Last week, one of my bloggers posted a youtube clip from the Dr. Phil show of Sandy Patti singing Ain't No Mountain High Enough while a girl with Down's Syndrome did ASL interpretation. I didn't notice that the girl was retarded until halfway through the clip (the camera mostly avoided her), but I was having a good laugh at Sandy Patti, the big white lady pouring her heart and soul into the Motown tune. Sandy Patti is like a blonder, less famous Kathie Lee Gifford, and just as ludicrous.

When I finally did notice the girl, it became suddenly exponentially more bizarre and hilarious. I cracked up at the insanity of this woman who had decided that the best way to convey her message would be to sing this song and have a retarded girl do ASL with her, and that it was working because this room full of people was obviously deeply affected by it. What a world.

I sent the clip to J and another friend who I was sure would find it as absurd and funny as I did. Both of them replied saying, basically, "I don't think this is funny." In an instant I changed from the sophisticated artist with a dark sense of humor to the cruel oaf laughing at the retarded girl, and I was mortified. (Neither of my friends reprimanded me. This anxiety was of my own creation.) I know I wasn't laughing at the retarded girl, but, for some very frustrating reason, it was more important to me to know that my friends know that. And of course there's no explaining it. ("I wasn't laughing at her, I was laughing with her." How ridiculous.) And really, even though I wasn't laughing at the retarded girl, I was laughing at the fat white lady, who, after all, was just doing her best to bring joy into the world.

There may be a lesson bigger than the size of my head in this, something like, "A dark sense of humor is fine until you hurt somebody." But mainly what I've learned (for the ten billionth time) is that despite the fact that I try to chip away at it every day, my ego is still as big as Mt. Everest.

Last night over dinner, J told me something that might serve as exculpatory evidence: On the youtube site -- when I forwarded the URL to my friends, it took them to youtube, not to the blog where I found the clip -- it's titled "Sandy Patti Butchers the Hits with a Retard." On the blog where I watched it, there was no title. I never would have laughed if I'd seen that title. You know that, don't you?

Brouhaha de Español.

My Spanish teacher sat the class down for a heart-to-heart this morning.

Apparently there's a big flap in the Spanish department because the average test scores in all 20 classes of first-year Spanish were very low. Also, the range from highest to lowest score was very wide, some 45 points (which for some reason is also a bad sign, though I'm not sure why).

This is the first year they've used this textbook and curriculum, and they're thinking maybe it's not going so well. They've decided that they can't -- again I don't know why -- help a brother out and adjust the test scores on a curve, but what they can do is lower the test's percentage value toward our final grade. Also, our teacher passed out a survey for us to evaluate the course so far and offer suggestions. For some reason I'm not feeling very secure in this little expedition. It's slightly encouraging to find out that it's not just me at sea. But, still, I'm at sea. And I think the boat is leaking.

I don't mind being a guinea pig -- I spent most of last year doing it for a living. But if they want me to test out their new curriculum, they should be paying me, not the other way around.

Boo, Spanish.

I had my first Spanish exam yesterday, and our instructor already had our tests graded to give back to us this morning. I got an 81.5. I wasn't surprised. Most of the exam was based on an audio recording of two people speaking at a normal conversational speed in two different accents (one Mexican, the other Colombian). We heard it twice. I could understand about 15% of it.

I have a hard time listening to poor-quality audio amplified in large rooms, because I have a slight hearing impairment. It's never been diagnosed, but what happens is some frequencies just turn into noise, like analog distortion. I can hear things, but I can't always understand the words. The impairment is subtle enough that it hasn't affected my life much -- though it does affect the lives of my friends, who have to put up with me constantly saying, "What?"

But I can't completely blame it on my hearing. The speakers were talking fast, and they sounded very different from anyone I've ever heard speaking Spanish. The woman totally swallowed her S's. S is kind of an important letter to leave out, I think.

The second part of the exam consisted of a synopsis of a movie in Spanish, mostly in words and syntax we haven't studied yet, and then questions about it. The idea -- this is a technique that's used a lot in our textbook -- is to skim the text for cognates (words that are similar in English) and then try to guess the general sense of the paragraph. This part was a little easier, though most of the class objected to a few of the questions, which were tricky considering we've only been studying this language for 5 weeks.

I'm frustrated. It's not like Biology where the material is just difficult and complex, but I know if I study like a maniac I can get it. A foreign language is difficult and complex, too, but I'm doing well with the written stuff. I know the grammar. But listening comprehension is an intangible skill. I don't know how to study it. We don't do much listening in class. Not even in lab, which I think is supposed to be for that. Lab is a waste of time. We'd be much better going to a Mexican restaurant and ordering in Spanish, or watching a Spanish TV show, or anything where we could be listening to people actually speaking the language.

I'm going to get some tutoring.

My Cousin From Red Bank, New Jersey.

It's my time of the month. Sometimes it's worse than others, but typically I get alternately panicky and depressed for a few days. Little things, like running out of printer ink can put me in a black mood for an hour or two. Tears come easily, sometimes out of nowhere, when I'm waiting for a bus, or, recently, when I'm working out.

The rent and bills are due.

I'm grateful that I've had a break of a couple months from this monthly punch in the gut, but now my financial aid money is running out. I have to come up with some cash to get me through November and December. I applied for a job cooking at a cafe in the neighborhood, and I was hopeful that they'd hire me in September, but I haven't heard from them, and I've been so overwhelmed with school that I haven't followed up on it. I really only need to work a couple days a week to make enough to cover the financial aid shortfall, but even so it's hard for me to imagine
fitting that in with all the studying.

I was also holding some hope of a little windfall for the Lizzie Borden option. We're still waiting to get a proposed agreement from the producers. When that is finalized and signed, I'll get some money. It could be next month. It could be next year. It could be never.

I've been working out at the gym every day for two weeks. My body is different. Especially my arms. I don't think you'd be able to tell by looking. Even I can't really notice a difference when I look in the mirror, but my arms feel bigger. It's a weird sensation when I touch my arms and shoulders, almost like touching someone else. And I've lost about 5 pounds. I didn't need or plan to lose weight, and I'll probably gain it back in muscle. But all that time on the elliptical machine and the fact that I'm eating a lot less now that I'm busy all the time have had an effect.

My American Government test was easy, but not as easy as I expected. One question really stumped me, and I second guessed my second guess and gave the wrong answer. I haven't gotten my grade yet, but I think that was the only wrong answer. (If you're interested, the question was about women's suffrage and government efforts to clean up air and water pollution, whether they started at the state or federal level. I didn't know. I had a hunch, since the question said "started" that something happened with those issues at the state level before the national government dealt with them, but I wasn't sure. I decided that, since both were ultimately national issues, the answer was federal. Even though I'm sure I got a good grade on the test, I hate that I didn't know that. I should know things like that. We should all know things like that.)

I Like My Yeast to Stay in My Bread.

Yesterday I had an appointment at a clinic that I think is part of the U.T. nursing school. I don't have insurance, or income to speak of, so I rely on the kindness of strangers (i.e., free or sliding-scale clinics) for my health care. Thankfully, I don't have any serious health issues. But I have had a persistent case of Tinea cruris (look it up), and I was concerned not only about the fact that it wouldn't go away but also about the possible side effects of using over-the-counter anti-fungal drugs on my skin over such a long period of time.

We've been studying prokaryotic cells in my Biology of AIDS class, and something about the huge projected slides of yeast cells budding in colonies made me get off my ass and make an appointment to see a doctor.

It turns out there's not really a whole lot I can do about it that I'm not already doing. Some people are just more prone to these things. Especially people, like me, who sweat more than average. I'm an above-average sweater. Speaking of sweaters, lately I regularly see people, mostly women, walking around campus wearing sweaters. Oh my god, it's 93 degrees out! I can barely stand to be wearing pants.

The doctor who saw me was Lisa Doggett, daughter of my favorite Congressman. That made my day!

I'd Like to Thank God, Because Now I Know He Exists Because He Gave Me An A on My Biology Exam.

Just kidding. About god, not about the A. I got a 90! Actually, I got an 84, but there was a 6-point curve. If there are questions on her exams that less than 25% of the class gets right, the professor considers those questions to have been ambiguous or too confusing or just too difficult, and she takes the number of points those questions are worth and adds that many points to everyone's scores. In this case, there were three such questions. (I'm sure I could have said that in fewer words.) Even with the curve, the median score was 68 -- and I found that out before I knew my grade. Anyway, glory hallelujah.

I have a test in American Government tomorrow. My easy class. But I don't want to get all cocky and blow it, so I'll spend the evening studying the Constitution and Federalism and such. I have a quiz tomorrow and a test next Tuesday in Spanish and a 2-page paper due in English next week, too. Must be the season.

Tell Me Why, I Don't Like Mondays.

My biology test today was hard. HARD. And I really knew the material. I could have a conversation with you about it. (Let me know if you ever just want to chat about nucleotides or eukaryotic cells.) It was a multiple choice test -- those always throw me a little anyway -- and this professor is very clever and she posed a lot of questions in ways that force you to think on more than one level, so it didn't feel so much like an evaluation of my familiarity with the material and concepts as a test of my logic skills. (For instance, she often included answers like "1 and 2 are both correct," or "two of the above are correct.") I rushed through the last several questions because time was running out, and on half the questions I didn't feel at all sure of my answers. Shit.

Biology and Spanish are really testing me. I study both subjects for at least a couple hours a day, often more, and several hours on the weekends, and still my grip is tenuous. Both classes require so much memorization, and it's relentless. This is the fourth week of classes, and I already have a stack of 250 words in Spanish that I need to know, besides the grammar. There are slightly fewer words to memorize in Biology, but they don't for the most part match a word in English that means the same thing. Rather, each word corresponds to at least a paragraph of plain English. And they're long fucking words!

I'm going to bed.

Fall.

I survived my first week at the gym. I'm still sore, but much less so. Now it's only a general soreness all over. In just a week, my shoulders are noticeably (to me) different, bigger, and that's enough encouragement to keep at it.

My first Biology exam is on Monday, so I'll be studying all weekend. I think I'm in fairly good shape because I've studied all along, but there's a shitload of vocabulary to keep in my brain.

The weather seems to be hinting the last few days that maybe, just maybe, summer will be over soon. If I have ever done anything remotely resembling praying, I am doing it now for that.

The Unknown Life of a Great Movie.

Did anyone see The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys? It was made in 2002, but I don't remember it coming out in theaters. I read an article about Jodie Foster in the New York Times by Manohla Dargis last week in which she mentioned this movie that I had not heard of. (I'm so happy the Times finally got rid of their stupid TimesSelect thing where they hid the good articles behind a pay barrier.) All the article said about the movie was that Jodie Foster plays a one-legged nun, which was enough for me, so I greencine'd it and J and I watched it last night.

Jodie Foster produced it, and she's great as the nun, but the movie is about the boys. See it if you haven't. It's full of the best kind of surprises. Most people seem to already get the comic book thing, but I never did really, until I saw this movie.

Ow.

Today I worked out on my own for the first time, and I came home feeling defeated because I could only do about half of what I had done with the trainer. I wondered if it might be because he was not there encouraging me, but a better guess is that it's because I'm so fucking sore I can hardly move. Yesterday I woke up feeling like I got hit by a truck. This morning it felt like the truck put it in reverse and backed over me. Most of the pain is in my arms and shoulders and chest.

I almost didn't go to the gym today. Since I could hardly lift my backpack, I wondered if it would really be productive to try to lift weights. Finally I told myself to just go and do whatever I could do. I didn't want to skip a day so early in the program. (Besides, my backpack weighs about 3 times as much as any of the weights I'm lifting.) Most of the exercises that my trainer had me doing for 10 reps I could only do 6 or 8.

I found out that the gym is much less crowded at 1:30 than it is at 5, so I may start going early on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. On Tuesday and Thursday I have a couple big gaps between classes, but I can't imagine going to class after the gym. I can't imagine doing much of anything after the gym. Honestly, I could barely work the computer to check my email when I got home. (I'm trying hard not to exaggerate, because that would be complaining, which I don't do any more.)

After I regained the partial use of my hands, I wrote my first paper! It's only a one-page paper, but it was exciting for me because it's the first in my second college career. It's called "Is That a Pen in Your Pocket?" It's a reaction paper to the Sandra Gilbert essay, "The Queen's Looking Glass," which is a pretty important piece of writing if you're a feminist literary scholar. Check it out.

Good Lord, It's Early.

Last night at Hut's -- J and I go fairly regularly on Monday night 2-for-1 veggie burgers -- I could barely life my water glass to take a drink. The glasses at Hut's, like at so many places in Texas, hold about a half gallon of water, but I think I would have had trouble with a juice glass last night.

I had my first workout with my trainer yesterday. This morning, my arms are so sore I'm wincing every time I move them. I don't know if that's why I woke up at 3:30 and couldn't get back to sleep.

The workout must have jogged something loose in my brain, because on the way home my idea for the short paper I have to write this week started taking shape seemingly all by itself. Seriously, it was like turning on the radio and listening to someone talk. Or maybe I'm schizophrenic.

The workout experience is hard to put into words. As I got more and more fatigued, I started to feel pretty emotional. I think I may back off a little on my tendency to intellectualize every new experience I have and just let this one sink in. All I'll say is that walking home I felt very, very good.

Jesus Was a Sissy and Christians are Hot.

I read a blog called Joe.My.God. every day. I started reading it because I can't stand the mainstream gay media -- which is too obsessed with shopping and hairless torsos -- but I still want to keep up with so-called gay culture and issues. Joe.My.God. is like a friend with a great sense of humor keeping you up to date.

Joe has a lot of readers, and every so often a subject will start a long free-wheeling thread of comments. Sometimes interesting, sometimes not. There are a few blowhards who are hard to take -- some might include me in that category and I'm okay with that -- but there are also a lot of smart, thoughtful commenters.

Things Joe's readers like to argue about are "old gay vs. new queer," "transexuals: yea or nay," and, lately, whether We (this community of people who can't agree on what we are or who is included or what to call ourselves but is broadly defined by some kind or other of sexual deviance) like or dislike being represented in the mainstream media by effeminate men (e.g., Carson what's-his-name on Queer Eye for the Blah-blah or more recently Chris Crocker, the so-called crazed Britney Spears fan who is actually a performance artist but people don't seem to be able to tell the difference between art and reality anymore): the "Sissy Question."

Aaaanyway, coincidentally, someone recently handed J, or he picked up somewhere, a religious tract called The Sissy, published by Chick Publications (named after the guy who writes the tracts). It's pretty funny, so I thought I'd share it with you. The drawing style reminds me of illustrated paperback porn novels that I used to buy at a great bookstore in the West Village. I can't remember the name of the store; it hasn't been there for years, but it was a neighborhood institution, very dusty and nondescript. Mostly, it had long racks of vintage 70s and earlier gay porn magazines. (I used to frequent the place in the early 80s, so I guess the magazines weren't really vintage then, just used. Ew.) And then smaller racks of pulp novels. A lot of them were truck driver stories. I loved them.

Libraries and Sexual Identity.

I've been wondering, since the Senator Craig scandal has shed so much light on the previously esoteric world of tearooms, has sex in public bathrooms decreased -- because there's a big spotlight on it now, making people more afraid of getting caught -- or decreased -- because, now that the arcane signals have been broadcast to the world, everyone can play?

I can't say I'm an aficionado, but it's definitely on my radar when I walk into a public restroom. The first anonymous sexual encounter I had was in a restroom in the college library where my mother worked. It was a year or two after I'd left for college but I was home for the summer. I was waiting for my mom to get off work, reading in a small lounge next to the card catalog. It was summer, so the place was deserted, but there was another man in this lounge, also reading. He kept looking at me. I was looking back. I'm not sure how I knew to do this, but when he got up and went to the bathroom (which was next to the lounge) I waited a minute and then got up and followed him. It's been many years, so I don't remember the sequence of events -- was there foot-tapping? I don't remember -- but it ended with me on my knees with my penis under the wall getting a blowjob. At that time, I had only had 2 or 3 sexual partners, and it had not occurred to me that I could have sex with someone I couldn't even see.

When I was in junior high and high school, I spent a lot of time at this library. I liked books, I liked hanging out with my mom, I liked that it was a college library -- I saw myself as much more intellectually advanced than the shit-kickers I went to school with. (If you think I'm a snob now...) I even worked there a couple days a week my junior and senior years in high school, and full-time during the summer between.

It's where I learned about homosexuality, by reading the Kinsey books, and started to come to terms with my own deviant feelings. I worked in the reference department for a librarian who, I see in retrospect, knew I was a gay kid and made a great effort to let me know it was okay. She talked about her gay friends (she was a former Catholic nun married to a former priest, so she had a few homosexual friends), and she introduced me to lesbian feminist writers.

I was going to say I wonder how she knew, but I was going through my first wave of Judy Garland obsession when I was 16, so, duh. She consoled me when -- after I'd gotten tickets to a Liza Minnelli concert in Indianapolis 6 months in advance and looked forward to it more than anything ever before, but, a week before the date, Liza canceled "due to exhaustion" -- I was practically suicidal.

I still like libraries a lot. I feel at home in a library.

Reclamation.

I had my first meeting with my personal trainer, a very fit young man who said, "yes, sir" and "no, sir" to everything I asked him. We met briefly to discuss my "fitness objectives." I felt like a shy high school girl crossed with someone's totally uncool dad. I know, scary. The trainers at the U.T. gym are studying to become certified. They're inexperienced, but inexpensive.

I have one fitness objective, which is basically, "yes." We scheduled two sessions next week. I can't wait to start. He told me I should see and feel different in as little as six weeks, since I'm starting pretty much at zero. He looked me over and said that he thought I was starting with a "good foundation." No one has ever told me that before. (I think he meant, "At least it's not like you're 350 pounds and asthmatic.")

Since I first mentioned that I was going to start working out at the gym and that I'm a little frightened of it, many of my gay men friends -- as well as readers of this blog, guys I don't even know -- have expressed sympathy and support. It's funny, and I've been very moved by it; I never thought of this step in the terms I'm starting to see it in now, as a reclaiming of territory that was denied me as a kid. Denied to me partly by other boys because they were cruel, were bullies, but I think mostly self-denied because of my confusion and discomfort with an environment where there was obligatory intimacy with other boys in the form of physical contact and nudity.

The sad thing is that an environment of natural intimacy among men would have been such a healthy thing for a little gay boy. I feel a great sadness and regret sometimes that I missed all that. For me, the first -- and only for many years -- situation in which it was appropriate or even possible to touch or be touched by boys or men was when having sex.

That idea of reclaiming male space is obvious now, because I'm staking a claim in this particular gym which is full of boys just barely out of high school who are masculine and athletic and, at least apparently, sexually confident, just like the boys I was afraid of 30 years ago. But now, because I'm as old as their parents, to these boys I'm either invisible or I'm an authority figure.

Patti Smith Makes It All Better.

I had a vivid and rambling dream about Patti Smith last night. Through most of it, we were just talking quietly in a bright, white-painted New York loft. We were sitting very close, and I had to lean in to hear her. I don't remember what we talked about, but she smiled a lot and her eyes were so bright. When I got up to leave, we lingered at the door for a long time, and she hugged me over and over.

I had gone to bed feeling anxious because there wasn't enough time last night to study my Spanish as much as I wanted to, and I woke up reassured.

God's Gonna Send the Water From Zion.

It's raining, and I opened my windows for the first time in four days. J said a storm was coming -- his sinuses tell him these things. The weather has been absolutely, relentlessly stultifying for the last week, day and night, but now it's cool and breezy.

I took a break from studying so we could watch the two remaining episodes of Peep Show on DVD (we started watching it last night -- it's really really funny) and then we went to Hut's for 2 for 1 veggie burgers. Now back to Microbiology. We're still on the chemistry chapter, which is like a fascinating nightmare. I'm simultaneously enthralled and terrified. Is all that stuff really happening inside me? and how can anyone possibly keep it all straight?

Monday is a bear. I have Spanish lab at 8 a.m., biology lecture at 9, Spanish class at 10, and biology "discussion section" (which is a small-group review session with a grad student) at noon.

I have to study now.

Kane Welch Kaplin.

Our old friend Fats Kaplin was in town on Friday, playing with Kevin Welch and Keiran Kane at the Cactus Cafe. They go by the name Kane Welch Kaplin -- it's the three of them along with Keiran Kane's son Lucas Kane on drums. It's been a while since I heard such beautiful songs and beautiful playing. J and I were friends and neighbors of Fats and his wife Kristi Rose when we lived in Nashville, Fats produced and played on the record we made there (The Hey Y'all Soundtrack), and we met Kevin and Keiran at the Kaplin's house, probably more than once, but somehow I never paid attention to their music.

The Cactus Cafe is a funny place. It's a small listening room-type venue. The shows there are usually in the folk/Americana/Texas singer-songwriter camp which is revered here in Austin. It's on the U.T. campus, in the student union building, but I'm sure most of the students have no idea it exists. The audience is older, the grey ponytail and Hawaiian shirt crowd. It's the crowd that J and I spent so much time and energy wooing when we were doing Y'all. A faction of that audience loved Y'all, but we were never an ideal fit because we wanted to do more than sit and play. (The fact that the "more" that I wanted to do became, over time, different from the "more" that J wanted to do is what pulled us apart eventually.)

Kevin and Fats and Keiran sit and play. The stillness is what makes it soar. There's no detectable showmanship -- though they're charming and engaged -- but the trick is to make the audience feel like they're sitting in your living room, and these guys are good at it. I guess at some point, in the life of a touring folk musician who spends as much time on the road as at home, these little acoustic venues become their living room.

I fancied myself that kind of songwriter, because I love that stuff so much, but I wasn't interested in developing the musicianship that this genre requires. The simplicity of the presentation is what makes it so affecting, and it is also what makes it crucial that you be a very good player, because it's only you and your song, your voice and your guitar. I was aware of my musical shortcomings all along, but Friday night it was really clear to me.

I came home and downloaded from iTunes one particularly gorgeous song they played called "I Can't Wait." If you're a fan of songwriting, you might want to check these guys out.