What's-His-Name

An actual conversation which took place this weekend:

Girl: ... when John comes over this week.
Guy: Oh, your brother's coming into town?
Girl: No, John, the guy I'm seeing. We need to come up with a way to distinguish the two when referring to them.
Guy: Oh, okay.

[Conversation continues...]

Guy: He's Portuguese, right? What about something like "Portuguese John"?
Girl: Nah, that's too long and cumbersome. Besides, it sounds kinda racist.
Guy: You could shorten it...
Girl: But that would make him...
Guy: Porta-John!
Girl: That is just mean. I'm vetoing that one.

It's a Bird, It's a Plane...

It's me!

Your results:
You are Superman

Superman 70% Hulk 55% Robin 54% Iron Man 50% Green Lantern 50% The Flash 50% Batman 50% Spider-Man 45% Catwoman 40% Supergirl 37% Wonder Woman 32%

You are mild-mannered, good, strong and you love to help others.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz



Via ryanaceto and Mike.

Pants on Fire, Or Now I've Gone and Done It

I couldn't resist, so I stole this off of MysteryGirl! (I love that she, too, uses an exclamation point) and Anonymous Midwest Girl (two girls at the same time! Straight men everywhere are all jealous o' me).

THE RULES: Post a comment with a COMPLETELY MADE UP AND FICTIONAL memory of you and me. It can be anything you want - good or bad - BUT IT HAS TO BE FAKE. When you're finished, post this little paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people DON'T ACTUALLY remember about you! You've got free reign. Start your sentence "Remember when you and I...."

Okay, go.

Spanish Lessons

Things I Learned on my recent vacation in Spain:

- My Spanish doesn't suck as bad as I thought it did.

- If it does, well, the people I encountered in Spain are quite generous and patient in working very, very hard to understand the grammatically incorrect babble spewing forth from my mouth.

- If your friends have a rudimentary grasp of Spanish, a good way to convince them that you're really good at it is to toss in a bunch of reflexive verbs just because.

- The last item doesn't work as well on the native Spanish speaker who has to listen to you and doesn't quite understand what you're trying to say due to the random "se"s that you're tossing in before all the verbs.

- When I try to speak Spanish to native speakers, I suppose I sound pretty much the same as latino immigrants here in America with a lower grasp of English... only with our language preferences reversed.

- If I worked just little bit harder at flirting with the hottest boy in the universe, he may have actually come up to my room after work. (Okay, that's not a Thing I Learned, it's just something I really wish I had done.)

- As in the United States, shoe shopping with an excruciatingly finicky woman is positively maddening. This is particularly true when you've hit the 100-minute mark, no end appears in sight, and you find yourself in an area of town that somehow contains a remarkably dense concentration of shoe stores.

- Virgin Atlantic Airways rocks my world. The flight crew is top notch, friendly, and have a great sense of humor. I fucked up big time as I boarded my flight to Heathrow (transferring to another airline for the next leg), and they went soooo far beyond the call of duty to help me that I feel compelled to write a letter for one guy's file. Oh, and it doesn't hurt that they have adorable accents, and they're easy on the eyes (women AND men).

- It's an international phenomenon for men to flirt with skinny blond chicks, however transparent their attempts. At dinner one night, I spent 15 minutes serving as the English/Spanish liaison between my three girlfriends and our non-English-speaking waiter before we finally ordered, followed by sporadic attempts to ask for extra stuff, like an extra bottle of sangria or more bread. When my skinny blond chick piped up, "Sal, por tavor [sic]" ("salt, please"), our waiter complimented her on her Spanish. Uh, who just asked you a gazillion questions, in Spanish? Me, on behalf of the girl who couldn't do so herself. Grrrr.


Things I Wish Some of Mis Amigas Learned or Knew:

- By the time you've been visiting a foreign country for five days, you should probably make some kind of effort to pick up some of the words. (Heck, you should probably have made that effort before we left.) This includes learning that it's "por favor," not "por tavor." Seriously, who doesn't know that one?

- Along the same vein: it's "flamenco," not "flamingo." And it's "salida," not "salada." Also, since "jamón" is on every single menu we've seen since we've been here, you may want to pick up what it means by the, oh, fourth time you see it available to you.

- By the time you've stayed in your rented apartment for five days, you really should be capable of returning to said abode without an escort. Pay attention to where you are and how you got there. You're pretty damn lucky we didn't "accidentally" separate from you.

- The last item is especially true when you're having a cerveza in a bar at Calle XXX no. 18 and our apartment is located at Calle XXX no. 24.

- Just because it's a digital camera and "you can just delete it" if the first shot doesn't look great, doesn't mean you have carte blanche to take 20 minutes to shoot 36 shots of each and every view. Point, shoot, glance at the final product, move on.

- Finicky eaters really need to stay out of foreign countries. Because food choices in other countries can be waaaaay different from food choices available in the U.S.

- You've committed an incredible oversight -- and spoken a great deal about your expectations of what your friends are going to tolerate of you -- if you didn't bring your reading glasses with you thinking that you wouldn't need them. The need to read menus and maps, just to name two, hinges on reading small print.

- If you're spending all your time souvenir shopping, you're not really seeing the country. You're buying things that make it look like you've seen the country, but you're wasting LOTS of valuable time buying keepsakes of things you haven't actually seen or experienced.


Okay, I kinda feel better now. I feel like I've forgotten something, but it'll come to me.

I Left My Heart in Spain

Warning: This was my first-ever foray with a digital camera. As such, the photos in the links below are of exceedingly high graphic quality (each frigging shot is least 1.5MB) and the pages may download slowly if you have a slow connection. Also because it's my first foray with a digital camera, there are way more pictures in the albums than need to be.

That said, I present to you, my exceedingly anally-filenamed photos of my trip to Spain:

Day 1 - Sevilla. Includes the Alcazar, the Catedral de Sevilla, the Giralda Tower, and the Plaza de Espana.

Day 3 - Granada. Mostly pictures of the Alhambra.

Day 4 - Ronda. Includes the oldest bullring in Spain, the breathtaking cityscape (it's situated atop a deep gorge), and ancient Arab baths (who knew they took baths?) (I KID!).

Day 5 - Santiponce, and more Sevilla. Mostly pictures of Italica, the site of some "Roman" ruins (I'm skeptical). ** I decided not to bother to upload these shots because they're not all that interesting, frankly. Except for when my friend Elizabeth and I start gettin' jiggy widdit, which is hilarious, but probably only to us.

Day 6 - Cordoba. Mostly pictures of the Catedral Mezquita.

I know that by linking to other pages, I run the risk of people saying, "Hey, your shots suck compared to those other shots." But hey, at least I was THERE for the shots I took.

Man, I hope these hyperlinks work.

Gifted

My cousin Bob is, without a doubt, the black sheep of my family. He's about 43 by now, and easily the biggest social maladjust I have ever known in my life. His personality leaves very much to be desired and sometimes I feel like he really is barely functional in terms of general brainpower. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, if you know what I mean. Even his siblings (three of them) don't care for him much. He's always been regarded as kind of a freak.

My brother scared the bejeezus out of me, though, when we talked tonight and he told me some stories that will forever make me see my cousin in a different light.

"Have you seen The Sixth Sense?" my brother asked.

"Yeah," I responded.

"Well," my brother continued, "Cousin Bob is that kid."

I snortled. "What," I asked, "he sees dead people?"

My brother wasted no time: "Yep!"

Seriously, he had to be kidding, right? Apparently, not so much.

Suddenly, all kinds of stories are emerging about Bob's little special ability:

- Back in Asia before we moved here, our family was looking to move into a new house or something. Bob -- a mere tot at the time -- walked into the house and immediately said that our family should not buy the house, that there was something wrong about the place. Research later revealed that, indeed, a murder had taken place in there.

- Shortly after his father died, he apparently kept reporting to his mother and siblings that my uncle was "cold" and that he wanted steak. I'm not sure how they resolved that one. Perhaps they left him an offering of steak.

- (This one scares the crap out of me most) Another of my uncles just randomly shot a digital photo of a pool in Los Angeles, where still another of my uncles lives. That photo was eventually sent to Bob over email. Seeing the photo, Bob asked, "Why is Brandon in the picture?" No one else looking at the photo has ever seen a person in the shot, but Bob described him with some detail, including facial features and describing a hoodie he was wearing. Again upon further research, apparently a kid named Brandon did indeed die in that pool wearing a hoodie a few years before my uncle and his family bought the place.

The thought that my cousin has the ability to talk to dead people frightens the crap out of me. Apparently he's so used to it now he's just perfectly fine with their presence in his life. I suppose that's how Haley Joel Osment's character will eventually deal with his gift.

Now I also feel bad because we've been treating him like crap for decades. I've always kind of justified it just by saying that his personality was always so unpleasant that it just begged for reciprocal treatment. Now I'm thinking that perhaps one of the reasons he was so unpleasant to begin with is because this Gift -- or is it a Curse? -- might have adversely affected his personality in some way. There's a chicken and egg theory going on: which came first, his bad personality, or our treatment of him? And if his bad personality came first, is it the result of having to deal with dead people talking to him all the time?

And finally: I'm supposed to visit that LA uncle in a few weeks. I'm even supposed to stay at his house! Now that I know some kid died in the pool there, I think I'm gonna be freaked out the entire time I'm there. Lord knows I sure as hell ain't planning on swimming. I'll just conveniently forget my swim trunks.

Photoblogging sucks

Well, I have nothing against people who write and publish photoblogs. But I just spent the last 45 minutes or so uploading a set of photos onto this blog to share my experiences over my Spain vacation, but the layout would never work properly. I blame this on Blogger's photo uploading function, which doesn't really lend itself well to effective photo publishing if you've also got text in the entry.

So sharing the photos (and blogging about the vacay in general) may have to wait until later... or until I get a Flickr account or something. Right now, I'm dog tired and need to sleep before work tomorrow.

En España

¡Hola de España!

Arrivó a Sevilla sábado y pasó dos noches allá (¡sur un sofa!, porque mis tres amigas con quien estoy viajando somos un poquito difíciles). Ya vi el Alcázar -- muy impresivo.

Hoy estoy en Granada -- ya pasó una noche aquí, pero vamos a salir a Ronda esta noche. En Granado, vemos al Alhambra por la mayoría del tiempo aquí.

Mañana verá Ronda, y después Córdoba.

¡Las primeras tres días lluvió! A mí no me gastaba.

¡Que me espera buen viajes! O, al menos, ¡viajes mejor que las primeras dias!

This blog entry typed in Spanish (some slight keyboard challenges), which will explain why it sounds like it's coming from a retarded three-year-old Spanish-speaking person.

Regresando a los EE.UU. próxima domingo. Nos vemos.

Hasta Luego

I'm taking a vacation.

I head out of town tomorrow afternoon and return the weekend following. No new posts for me.

I tinkered with the idea of getting a guest blogger for the week-plus that I'll be gone, but that didn't pan out.

Right, I'm outta here. Later, all.

I Feel So ... Exposed

I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later when one writes a fully publicly-accessible blog, but frankly, I seriously thought that the odds of anyone of particular interest (i.e., those people mentioned in this blog) would find this blog were so low as to be negligible.

Yeah, as usual, I was wrong.

I have recently come to realize that some people mentioned on this blog have, in fact, found it. I don't know how often they read it -- Hi! if you're reading this now -- but they know of its existence. To wit, the guitarist on whom I harbor(ed?) a mad crush (who got married a few months ago) has likely read my recounting of the time I accosted him on the Metro -- because his wife has seen it and posted about it on some message board somewhere. Apparently someone from the band he plays with had found this blog a while back -- again, Hi! if you're reading this! -- and passed it along.

Oh, and apparently, Guitarist's wife thinks that I give her dirty looks at gigs. Seeing as I've only ever seen her once at a performance and wouldn't be able to identify her in a lineup tomorrow, I think she's mistaken.

I am left to wonder how many other people I've identified in this space have read my thoughts about them and just kept their peace on the matter. I suppose in the end it doesn't matter anyway, because I seldom act on my inappropriate thoughts. So, for example, it's not like I would ask Guitarist Guy if he wanted to go get a hotel room or something.

So now I'm busy mentally listing all the discrete people I've identified by description on this blog and wondering whether they've seen it and recognized themselves in it. A part of me still insists it's about as likely as actually successfully meeting up through Craigslist's Missed Connections, but now I'm not so terribly sure.

Hold 'Em Eye Candy

I can be such a stalker sometimes I even scare myself.

Tuesday nights are my regular poker nights. I'm becoming quite the frequent player at a nearby (notice I don't say "local") bar which hosts free hold 'em tournaments every week. Having had no plans at all for the Christmas/New Year holidays, I took some solace by trekking down to the pub and playing a few hands (which is usually about as long as I last).

Longtime readers of this blog know I'm relatively comfortable in a straight bar, all things considered, even though I do like some trappings of familiarity: I've started to look for and try to sit at the table that's occupied by another set of regulars, a cute lesbian couple. (I've tried to send them signals that we're on the same team, but so far my subtle hints haven't worked. I hope they don't think I'm some standard straight guy turned on by chicks gettin' it on. Soooooo not the case.)

Anyhoo, the only "problem" arises when cute boys show up to these poker nights. It throws my game off! Once, I was at a table and I kid you not, one guy there (who claims his name was "John") was really Seth Green trying to go incognito. He even threatened physical violence when I pointed it out to him (as if he hadn't heard it before). (Actual conversation: "Dude, you bear an uncanny resemblance to Seth Green." "Don't make me have to stand up and lay the smackdown on you.") A few hands after I made the reference (and after we had to explain who Seth Green is to a few of the other players at the table), another girl commented, "You really do look like a mirror image, though..." to which he again responded, "Don't make me have to hit you too." Seth John apparently even lives like half a block from me. Of course, I think he now hates me. Whatever.

A few weeks back I noticed a different cute kid (and he is young, which is odd because I usually wouldn't consider "boyish" my "type" per se) when, during a table re-shuffle, he ended up at my table. Don't get me wrong, lots of attractive guys usually show up to these poker nights, and I've come to recognize some of their faces, but most of them are still so frat-boyish that I usually don't pay them much attention beyond taking note of their eyes and arms and chest and torso and smile and stuff. [Snicker]. But the kid who came to my table didn't have that frat-boy air about him, and in fact oozed just the right amount of awkwardness to make him insanely cute.

Strange thing about tournament poker is that I'm afraid it appears markedly obvious when you try to talk to one person at the table at the exclusion of others. If you say Hi to one guy but not to the rest of the people at your table, it's kind of a dead giveaway. Of what, I'm not sure, but it gives something away. When you're sitting at table with eight players and you only bother to introduce yourself to one, I think the other players notice.

So when Cute Guy sat down next to me, I had to make an effort to say something to him that didn't involve just "Hi, what's your name?" Eventually, it was "dude, are you cold?" seeing as he hadn't bothered to remove his coat. That broke the ice enough for us to chit chat just a little bit. Because I was afraid of stalking too heavily, we didn't talk too much that night.

Last night I headed over to the bar again and found him seated and ready to play. I quickly took the empty seat at his table (unfortunately, not next to him), and he recognized me and give me a nod and a smile. Woo hoo! I at least have facial recognition.

I managed to lose all my chips relatively early (like I said, it happens all the time) and had to get up to give my seat to another player. But, stalker that I am, I hung back for just a little bit to watch a few more hands. I won't say I wasn't at least partly motivated by the fact that Cute Guy was relatively short-stacked and I was relatively sure he wouldn't make it too much longer.

When he did bow out, I walked out with him and we chatted a bit outside the bar. (Unfortunately, we were turning in opposite directions the moment we left the bar; I had wanted to be able to walk with him for a bit just to talk. Or find out where he lives.) We talked a little bit about his tattoos (visible while he was dealing). I thankfully did not utter any statements about how much more of his skin I wanted to see.

I won't be making it to poker next week, but I all but told him I'd be stalking him the week after.

Of course, he's probably straight. Grrrr. Why can't I flirt like this with cute gay boys? Never mind, I think my cynical mind has already answered that question.

Granola

I was shopping with my friend Elizabeth at Costco yesterday. She's a very picky eater. In my opinion she hyperanalyzes the numbers on any food product she can get her hands on: too many calories, too much fat (completely disregarding "good fats" vs. "bad fats") etc.

So I shouldn't have been surprised when we got into this massive discussion over which ginormous box of granola bars to split.

Right next to each other were extreme packs of Quaker Chewy brand bars (flavors: chocolate chip, low fat s'mores, and peanut butter), and Nature Valley Trail Mix bars (flavor: Fruit & Nut, featuring Almonds, Peanuts, Cranberries, and Raisins). Granted, the "chewy" bars featured "whole grain," but all the conventional wisdom I've read would tell me that almonds, peanuts and cranberries beats out chocolate chips in terms of nutritional value any day.

Elizabeth was not convinced, and lobbied that we purchase the chewy bars. (This is odd, because, as I said, she usually prides herself on depriving herself of tasty foods if they run the risk of making her "fat.") Eventually, we turned to the FDA-mandated nutritional panels on the backs of the boxes. (I'd post them for you here, but I can't seem to download the Quaker Chewy info. Instead I'll provide you with competing links: Quaker Chewy vs. Nature Valley (scroll down for Fruit & Nut bars)).

Surprisingly enough, the chocolate chip bars contain, apparently, fewer calories, fewer carbohydrates, and less sugar than the trail mix bars. In addition, the chocolate chip bars provide some iron and calcium, whereas the trail mix bars do not.

Despite this evidence, I couldn't cede my ground. "You must be looking at the wrong numbers," I declared.

"We're looking at the same numbers! They're printed right here on the box!" Elizabeth declared.

"No, I mean there are numbers other than the ones the FDA requires them to print that would make the trail mix bars better."

"Uh, it's got more calories, sugar, and carbs, and no iron or calcium," Elizabeth told me. "What more do you want?"

"This discussion isn't going to get resolved well," I finally said, "because there is absolutely no way you will ever convince me, standing right here in this Costco aisle, that a smores chewy bar, or a chocolate chip bar, or a peanut butter bar, is actually better for you than a trail mix bar which contains almonds, cranberries, raisins and peanuts."

"But..."

"Ever."

In the end, we didn't buy either of them.

Then we went for dinner, after which I indulged in a triple peanut-butter ice cream concoction, including Reese's Pieces, chopped-up Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and peanut butter ice cream, at Maggie Moo's.

Four on Friday

I think I've been tagged by Dop over at My View from the Jeep for this meme. (I say I "think," because although my name is among those tagged, I can't be sure if there's another Dennis who reads his blog. But I thought I'd participate just in case.)

Four jobs you've had in your life: Bagger at grocery store, bakery prep mixer, high school chemistry t.a., attorney

Four movies you could watch over and over: Steel Magnolias, Clueless, Grease, Scream (trilogy)

Four places you've lived: Honolulu, Philadelphia, New York City, Washington DC

Four TV shows you love to watch: CSI, Grey's Anatomy, Com Central Premium Blend, The Amazing Race

Four places you've been on vacation: Madrid, Paris, Rome, Las Vegas

Four websites you visit daily: (besides the extensive blogroll to the right?) Washington Post, New York Times, fark.com, Craigslist Missed Connections

Four of your favorite foods: Steak, lumpia, fruit sorbet, sushi

Four places you'd rather be: (in terms of travel destinations?) Barcelona, Hong Kong, Vancouver, New York City

Four albums you can't live without: Gold (Olivia Newton-John), Yesterday Once More (The Carpenters), Dances With Angels (dance compilation), Rent original cast recording

Four magazines you read: Men's Health, Washington Lawyer, People, US Weekly (the latter two only because they're around the office and I read them at lunch)

Four cars you've owned: I have never owned a car in my life. I had access to my father's hand-me-down cars through high school. I've had no reliable automobile access since.

Four people to do this meme: I'm not going to tag anyone, but feel free to do this if you're reading this.

Hands Free Chivalry

An Open Letter.

To the Woman Exiting My Office Building at Approximately 3:00 PM Today:

I just wanted to give you a small bit of background, then ask you one simple question, which, by the time I'm done writing this missive, will likely spin off to more than "one" question.

Background: My office devours soft drinks like crazy. We take turns paying for two "fridge packs" of canned beverages at a time. This afternoon, I did the obligatory CVS run and as a result, I approached my building lobby carrying two 10-packs of Coke Zero, one in each hand.

This is, I'm sure, a fact you noticed, since the doors to my building (I'd say "our building", but I don't know if you work here or are simply a guest) are made of glass. I'm not that tall. You can take in my entire body with one quick glance, which would then include seeing that I had no free hands.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you did not see how I had to use my right foot to open the first set of double doors (again, because of my utter lack of free hands), because I presume you were still walking toward the inner set of doors and thus not really looking at me at the time.

But it's at the inner set of double doors that you engaged in what I can only regard as bizarre behavior. Through those completely transparent glass doors, you observed me approach as I tried to enter the building. Those same doors would have yielded your egress. We would have passed through the doors at the same time.

I'm counting up the options you had at this point:

1. You could have pulled open the door and let me walk through, which would have been very nice of you; I would have smiled and said "Thank you" for your effort;

2. You could have pushed your door and walked through, then stopped and held the door open after you were done to allow me to walk through; again, I would have smiled and thanked you for your effort; or

3. You could have stood there like an idiot on the other side of the glass door and watched me, with no free hands, work my way through the doors on my own.

I think we both know which option you actually chose.

Look lady, I'm not saying that it was hard for me to get through that door. I'm not saying that, had you not been there, I would have somehow been trapped outside my office building forever until some kind soul took it upon themselves to open the door for me.

But WHAT were you THINKING? (That's the one question, by the way. All the rest of these that follow are just offshoots.) A guy comes up to a door that he's obviously less than 100% prepared to open, and your first response is to stand there bemusedly while he opens the door on his own? What, do you regard that as some kind of triumph of spirit moment? Perhaps you were standing there with your heart proudly beaming for my accomplishment: "Look at the little trooper; no hands and yet he still manages to get the door open! Good for you, son!"

I'm all for holding the door open for a lady. Actually, I'm all for holding the door open for anyone, regardless of their sex. It's just one society's niceties that, when exercised from time to time make this world a more pleasant place to live. Were I not carring two fridge packs worth of canned beverages at the time, it is quite likely I would have opened the door for you. But you know what? I'm not terribly inclined to engage in the polite niceties of society when doing so would result in substantially awkward bodily contortions as would have been required when balancing twenty cans of Coke Zero.

If there's a next time -- and I really would hope there's not one -- I think I might actually take the time to stop, put down one of the packs of soda, and reach into my pocket to retrieve a quarter for you, so that perhaps you'd be able to buy yourself a freakin' clue.

Respectfully,
Dennis!

Passive-Aggressive Sexuality

(Wait, that title sounds wrong. But yet it's so much fun I'm going to keep it.)

As longtime readers of this blog know, I'm not out to my parents, even though most of my extended family has figured out this big "secret" already. Sometimes I feel like it's a cruel joke we're all playing on my clueless parents: the only two people in the world who don't know who I sleep with are the two people whose DNA make me who I am. But that's beside the point.

Over the years I've decided that my parents simply don't want to know, because by now they certainly should have figured it out. (By the way, this is the approach I take with most everyone regarding my sexuality: I don't announce it, but I don't shy away from it, and after being with me for long enough, it's really not that tough to figure out.)

Evidence that my parents aren't homo-friendly:

1. My mother once explicitly told me, in her one moment of tender-loving advice-giving to make up for the (at the time) 27 years of not-so-tender-or-loving-advice-giving, that, seriously, in a million years, don't... be gay. (It loses a little in the translation, but that really is exactly what she told me.)

2. When gay marriages were the big news story in Hawai'i, my father made a remarkably disparging noise at the image of two men at an alter during the ten o'clock news. I was sitting right next to him at the time. I think I cringed inwardly.

I have given up ever trying to change my parents' minds about anything, so their preconceived notions of gays and homosexuality is yet another thing that I've not going to talk to them about. As long as we're content not talking about it, we should be fine.

The thing is, I watch all of these coming-out movies and testimonials on television and stuff, and usually it's all about some kid who goes on and on about how he doesn't want to live his life when his parents "don't know him" or the gay kid's anguish at having to "hide a part of his life from his family." Me, I have no such qualms. You don't know my family. We're not that close. Even if I were dating a woman, I probably wouldn't feel the need to tell my parents all about it.

So this Christmas, I was wildly delinquent in putting the tchotchkes I bought for the 'rents in the mail to them. (A DVD, plus two sets of cute little Asian-inspired figurine sets, all reasonably priced.) I'm planning on getting them to the post office tomorrow.

I just looked over the card I had picked out for them, and in retrospect, it's a pretty awful card to send to one's parents on (the occasion of) Christmas:

We all know that
there's no such thing
as perfect parents.
But children don't need "perfect."
They just need love --
love that shelters them...
love that lets them make a few mistakes...
love that says,
"You really matter."
Love is all it takes to make good parents...
and that's exactly what you are.

Oy! The card I'm about to send out actually says, "You're not perfect, but hey, Merry Christmas!" Actually, when I bought it, I intended it as a passive-aggressive comment on the fact that my mother has not yet gotten to the point where she will let me make my own mistakes. She still gets incensed when she gives me advice on things that I fail to heed, for whatever reason. That's the line that grabbed me. So off it's going, in with the gifts.

And as cushioning material for the box to make sure nothing gets overly jostled during transit? I'm going to use a few (clean) pages from the Washington Blade.

The Obligatory "I'm Back!" Post

Happy New Year.

I rang in the new year by sleeping like there was no tomorrow. I swear, this has got to be some kind of medical condition or something. After getting home from a fundraising party (where I did some volunteer work) at around 2 AM on January 1, I didn't leave the house again until this morning.

The party was fun. The Floorshow was a little odd -- there appeared to be little discernible plot, despite their fervent attempts to create one linking the various drag lip sync performances, but all in all, it was pretty enjoyable. There were quite a good number of attractive men and boys there, none of whom, naturally, gave me a second look (except when I spilled beer all over the floor, repeatedly, because the tap ran much faster than it should have and every cup was at 70% foam on the first pour). One guy threw up in the middle of the floor show (suddenly not so hot anymore) and one woman became rather loud and obnoxious. And those two people were fellow volunteers. Not good. Hell, I only counted two paying partygoers as over-the-top. That can't be good.

Most of January 2 was spent sleeping. And having very, very odd dreams, which I can't recall at this time. I do remember that they were quite illogical. I lied and later told friends that I spent some of the day cleaning up the disaster area that is my apartment.

Now I'm back at the office. Can I just say this is even less enjoyable than I thought it was going to be.

Happy New Year!