A Long, Long Time Ago....

I randomly googled a friend of mine from elementary school the other day. I don't know why I did it; I just felt like it. Actually, I think it had to do with my college homecoming leading to nostalgia about my more "innocent" days, which led to the halcyon days of youth, with led to ... oh, never mind. The end result is, yes, I googled a childhood friend of mine.

I attended a public elementary school which was literally right across the street from my house. My neighborhood was pretty much lower middle class; my peers were a random assortment of kids of varying backgrounds, talents, and support structures. Yet even when I was under 10 years old, I remember most of my friends were the types who would end up in some sort of G&T program, whom the school singled out for some sort of academic strength. I was not destined to hang out with the classmate who still thought that the opposite of "boy" was spelled "gril." I know I sound like total insensitive snob for saying it, but academic achievement was such a big deal for me and my parents, even in grade school.

So only a few names popped into my mind when I got to thinking about kids I used to hang out with. One girl, R.O. (I'm actually going to try to maintain her privacy), came to mind, if only because she definitely had a distinctive name. And I liked her well enough. I remember learning, and playing, cribbage with her in the 5th grade. (Did I not tell you I was a big dork?)

It's surprising the stuff you find on the internet. I found out that R.O. was married by viewing pictures from her wedding. Surprisingly, I still recognized her younger sister, as well as her mother. And it's a little disturbing to see her mother, and other women her age, playing around with condoms at the bachelor party.

I also found her email address by looking at a list of her classmates in a doctoral program, from which she graduated last year.

(As an aside, I can tell you what you get if you google my not-too-common name: My work home page is buried in the middle of a slew of links to pages which talk about a guy who wrote some recognized scholarly treatise on the history of Asian-American civil rights. That's not me.)

I wondered if she would respond if I sent her an email. Heck, I wondered if she would even still remember me. But I figured I had to give it a shot. Because nothing sobers you to how life can change like talking to a girl you haven't seen for over 20 years.

R.O. did, in fact, respond to my email. She recognized my name, which quite surprised me. She's no longer living in Hawai'i, and she and her husband have at least one baby. We've been exhanging emails back and forth intermittently for a few weeks. I've told her that if she makes her way back east to she must tell me and we can get together. But I fear that travel with a baby may be tricky for her. (I hope her husband doesn't think I'm hitting on her or anything.)

Speaking of, seeing as we were prepubescent when we last exchanged any words whatsoever, she has no idea that I'm gay. She in fact asked about my personal life, including whether I was married and whether I had kids. I simply managed to avoid answering that question. It's strange, comfortable though I am with my sexuality, having to come out to all kinds of new people -- either if you've just met them or if you're re-establishing contact -- is still a somewhat tricky task. There's a balance to be struck -- it's something intimate enough that you just don't tell everyone if you're not positive they'll respond favorably, and yet by not saying anything, you lend some credibility to the notion that it's shameful (it's not).

If I were seeing someone, I wouldn't hesitate to tell R.O. that I was dating a wonderful guy. It's much more tricky to properly work it into conversation when you're trying to say, "I'm single, Bush won't let me get married, and even if I could I currently have no prospects anyway."

But after these past elections, I feel like I have to tell her. Being "out" is a political statement now, and there is substantial benefit to being as out as possible in this post-election "moral values" bullcrap society.

Le Raison d'être du blog

Aside from Randy -- hi Randy! -- and his friends who may stumble on to this blog from a link on his blog, I don't think that any of my personal friends read this blog.

Which is by design, to an extent, because I haven't really advertised its existence to many people. Randy knows about mine just because he's the one who turned me on to blogging on this site to begin with. But most of my other friends don't know that I do this.

Of the friends that do know, most of them have responded well, asking me to share with them the URL of this site. Of course, they usually do so in a setting where it's not easy for me to tell them without them forgetting, so they usually just say that I should email them the link later. And I usually don't, and they usually don't follow up.

In a previous post, the aforementioned Randy (wow, twice in one post!) mentioned the strange and unique interplay between the intimate and the distant that results from a public blog. You share whatever personal insights you want with a slew of strangers potentially entering your mind. And he's right -- I've done my fair share of invading blogs of random strangers and they, in turn, have graced my blog with their comments -- but I'm left to wonder what purpose this blog should be serving.

The more I think about it, the more I find it difficult to find reasons I'd want to share this blog with more friends. To wit:

1: If only random strangers are reading your blog, you don't have to censor yourself when you want to say bad things about someone you know. I've blogged about many of my friends on this blog: Josh, Ben, Debra, Lora, Mark, Chad, Rob, John, Joe, Jen, Chris, Liz, Linda, Sue, Christine, just to name a few. But what if I feel like complaining about something one or the other of them did or said? Of course, my style is not so much to bitch just for bitching's sake, but still, after I reach the generalized point, the fact remains that if the person I'm bitching about reads my blog at all, there could be some uncomfortable moments.

2: The friends you're able to talk to whenever you want to should not have to find out what you're thinking and how your mind works by reading your blog. Those people should be finding out more about you by hanging out with you, talking to you, and engaging in conversation with you. I've never met Peter or Matthew (who are the most frequent commenters on this blog), and they live half way across the country from me. We have not exchanged phone numbers or email addresses. The only way these people are going to get to know me is by reading my blog, and I by reading theirs. There's no such excuse for Debra to have to read my blog to know what I'm thinking.

3: None of the two above have anything to do with you, Randy. Because you're just a fluke, and you're cool, and I have never once had to censor myself with respect to anything I might want to say about you.

If anyone reading this has any comments which may explain why it's a great idea to let your friends read your blog, feel free to comment below.

I'm Getting Mean

This election is doing bad things to me. It's literally making me into a person who thinks things I don't like thinking. It's making me mean. Cases in point:

1: When I first heard this morning the Chief Justice William Rehnquist was hospitalized after undergoing a tracheotomy for throat cancer this past weekend, I was kind of excited. Then I was disappointed to hear that he'll probably be released soon, and will resume the bench by Monday.

2: When I heard that Attorney General John Ashcroft was hospitalized for pancreatitis or some other impairment of the gastric system (I forget when this happened), I was elated. I honestly entertained the idea of how wonderful it would be if he didn't survive that scenario. Again, I found myself let down when he survived and resumed his rampage against civil liberties. (Even then, though, I found myself thinking that I did just wish that it hurt like hell.)

3: I was actually rooting for the pretzel when Mr. Bush choked that time.

I hate the thought that I've been happy at the suffering and near-death of others. This is what this administration has done to me. I'm not blaming the Bush administration per se, but they sure haven't helped.

Sentries at the Gate

I've reached the conclusion (again) that I am emotionally stunted and way too guarded for my own emotional well-being. I am once again driven to this conclusion by a random confluence of events over the past few weeks which, when examined in their totality, make the conclusion inescapable.

1: I will never actually date anyone seriously because I have internal triggers which will make this impossible.

I actually flirted with a guy on Tuesday night. Frankly, I just did it for fun. That and I was probably a little less than sober as I did, even though we weren't even really supposed to be drinking that night. The flirting consisted exclusively of some arm-touching and some back-fondling. At some point he even gave a kind a back massage. That was really about it.

I honestly don't expect that this guy will even remotely make an effort to get in touch with me again, even though I gave him a business card that bears my cell phone number. Why not, you ask? Because by this point in my life I'm hard-wired to believe that I repulse gay men -- or at least I do if they ever get a chance to stop and actually think about me. His having left the party has given him a chance to think. Ergo, I'll never hear from him again.

2: I keep far too much distance from even some of my closest friends.

Don't get me wrong, I love my friends dearly. There's nothing I wouldn't do for my closest ones. But I don't expect the same in return. Heck, at times I'll literally feel like it's simply wrong for me to impose on anyone, including my closest friends. My fiercely independent streak takes hold and asserts itself to an irrational end. (I've sort of blogged about this before.)

Thus, making new friends is difficult for me. No, wait, let me clarify that: Meeting new people isn't too terribly difficult; it's the making new friends part that's trickier. You can meet new people all the time; it's the intimacy that comes with making them your friend that's tricky. And I find that this is a difficult endeavor for me.

I've met several great people in recent months whom I truly consider wonderful people whom I'd love to be able to hang out with more. Yet each of them, as is to be expected, has their own sets of friends, which include their own shared sets of memories/habits/hobbies/rituals, of which I, of course, have no part. So when I say to my newfound acquaintances, "Hey, you guys actually do that? I've always wanted to! I'd love to join you sometime...." it feels like I'm inviting myself into a social scene that doesn't necessarily want me there. All too often, this feeling is reinforced when those people actually do fail to include me when they make their plans.

3: I can't compose a personals ad to save my life.

Okay, this may sound stupid, but it's true. I've tried. It's quite difficult to put your life in 200 characters or less in a way which will actually attract attention. Whenever I try, I come across as trite at best, boring at worst. Is that who I am? Is that how people perceive me? Ugh.

What's worse, composing a personals ad forces me to set aside a more powerful impulse, viz., the impulse to get ballistic, and inappropriately bitter. Even if I find myself at a personals ad site with the best of intentions, and in a good mood, with the intention of composing a catchy ad for myself, I find myself overtaken with the desire to just type something like, "I'm not your type. There's nothing to see here. Move along. Get going now. Why did you even bother to click on this profile? Have fun. G'night now."

It's a good thing I'm doing okay professionally. At some point I'll just get a dog and call it a Life.

Reunion

So Homecoming was perfectly decent. Except the fact that I really didn't do anything very homecoming-y.

I met up with Chad for brunch. Literally, I had not seen him in years. I always feel bad when I lose contact with close friends like that. Chad's been in my life for so long it's really just not right to let stuff lapse, no matter how busy we are. We've known each other since the eighth grade. That's close to 20 years. It's well over 3/4 of my life. I'm impressed that I actually managed to keep in touch with someone from that far back in my past.

After brunch, we wandered around campus just to look at the superficial changes to it. Given the passage of time, it was impossible for me to tell if everything just looked different because substantial construction had taken place over the last eleven years, or because I had simply forgotten much of the way things looked before. The Bookstore had moved; it was replaced by a funky new student lounge for the business school. Two of the campus apartment buildings had been renovated (at least externally) and now featured floor to ceiling windows (I'm actually quite jealous of that). The new bookstore was basically a Barnes & Noble. The mini-strip malls along the outskirts of campus -- where we used to have to make do for meals on the weekends -- were updated and upgraded as well. There was even a "new" grocery store close to campus, eliminating the need for a six block hike into a sketchy area of town to get to the only decent grocery store around.

Chad, who has visited the city much more than I, was able to point out to me various changes, as well as stuff I had merely forgotten about. We stopped into a new swanky tea shoppe and had a few pots of tea with a peanut buttery desert. Things would have been so different had I attended this school when they had all this cool stuff around. That means I would have flunked out with a year. It was just such a cool campus.

We attended a few alumni mixing events. All the minority alumni groups co-hosted an event: the Asian group, the Hispanic group, the African-American group, the gay group. We hung out, scoping out the free food and (more importantly) free booze. Try as we might, Chad and I couldn't strike up a decent conversation with anyone for the life of us. Seriously now, what's the purpose of attending an alumni gathering if you aren't going even show the slightest interest in meeting fellow alumni? If you're only going to talk to the friends whom you usually would have talked to anyway, can't you just do that, say, in a bar, or at someone's apartment?

Chad and I eventually bailed on the thing completely and went back downtown for dinner. It was a great dinner, may I just add.

The day with Chad was nice. Oh, the dinner and the tea and the meandering around campus were nice, but the point here was the company. You can't buy friends like that. Memories like what we shared don't grow on trees. Our friends help shape our lives.

And our friends are also the ones who will be there for our future. We're no longer the high school kids whose biggest fear was an algebra exam or a date to some stupid dance. We're dealing with issues like how to balance insane hours at work with a decent social life. Our concerns include how to live life with HIV and whether we should execute plans for massive career shifts.

In the end, it wasn't about meeting fellow alumni. It wasn't so much about seeing the city and the campus again. Really, it was all about reconnecting with Chad.

Going Home (sorta)

Okay, so my homecoming is this weekend. When I first started getting informational materials on homecoming a few months ago, I unceremoniously chucked them in the trash like I usually do with mail from my alma mater. But they're persistent, those alumni relations people, and eventually I opened one piece of mail and thought, "Maybe I will go this year...."

I called my friend Chad, who not only graduated from college with me but also from high school with me, and asked him if he was planning on going. This simply because I had absolutely no intention of going to the homecoming alone, not knowing if anyone else I remotely like was going too.

See, the problem is, I didn't really enjoy my college experience at all. I didn't make many friends there. I didn't even enjoy being on my own. I had spent the first 17 years of my life in cozy seclusion, not being spoiled by my parents per se, but not really left needing anything of any importance. At first going away to college was like an extended summer camp -- you got a room, you had activities, you spent 100% of your time away from your parents... oh yeah, and you had classes too. Those pesky classes.

I quickly came to realize that I simply did not have the discipline to smoothly make that transition from high school kid to quasi-independent kinda-adult. I could skip class and no one would know. I could not do my reading and no one would yell at me. I could stay up until 3 a.m. on Tuesday and sleep until 5 p.m. Wednesday and the world would not end.

And I was not used to this. Nor was I prepared for this.

Obviously I didn't actually do all of the things I could have done, but I did relish my new-found independence all too well. While my peers made a nightly ritual of dinner followed by a few hours studying at the library, I bummed around my student lounge because I simply didn't feel like studying. Come midterm season, and then again come finals time, I panicked like nobody's business and managed to keep my head above water, but ugh. I could have handled it better. I should have. Somehow I never quite learned after first year that studying was a pretty damned important part of the college process. Every semester I'd repeat the same vicious cycle of goofing off and cramming, goofing off and cramming. It's a wonder I got the grades I did; even more so that I got accepted into law school and then passed the bar.

See up until the day I moved to college my life goal had simply been to get into a good college. Having accomplished that, I had no idea what happened next. I had failed to make any life plans beyond application and admission. Sure, I'd go to college, but what would I do there? I didn't have a clue. I had a general thought that when I left there I'd have a degree, from a good school, which would lead to a good job. But a degree in what? A job in what? I was aimless and drifty; as long as someone else was paying the bills, I was happy to do whatever.

I was no better socially. I was a maladjust. No one really wanted to be my friend. I kind of imposed myself upon certain groups just because they were there, but we were never really great friends. Eventually after first year we all moved to different dorms, and my contact with them was sporadic at best, again mostly because I hadn't formed the friendship bonds with them necessary to actually consider them good friends.

It didn't help that I was starting to finally acknowledge sexuality as part of life. In high school I was so busy with academics and extracurriculars and being with my friends that, honestly, I didn't give sex much thought at all. I graduated from high school a virgin and seriously don't think it was that big of a deal. I had more imporant things to do, like prepare for a speech and debate tournament, or study for that pop quiz which you know is just coming up in U.S. History when you least expect it, or rent movies and hang out with my friends.

But in college it was inescapable. People all around me were having sex, and no one thought twice about it. A bunch of 18- to 20-year-olds all running around the dorms, it's a recipe for orgasm. But I knew that the people I was sexually attracted to were not the ones who I should be attracted to. I didn't think Amy was sexually appealling. She was cute, but certainly not someone I'd like to have sex with. Now Kurt. Kurt was cute, and I definitely would have loved to see him naked. And so was Bob. And Mark. And the other Mark. And Peter. And Chip. And his roommate, whose name escapes me at the moment. You get the picture.

They say coming out is a highly individualized process, and each person takes it at their own pace. That being said, I still think it took me much longer than it should have to own up to the fact that I like guys. For two years I continued to hang out with Janet, a girl from my home state whom I knew when we were in the fourth grade. We were never dating, but just having her around made me feel more normal, like I was hanging out with the "right" people -- that is, a person of the opposite sex. But there was always something else. In my second and third years, my next door neighbor, whom I would see from time to time leaving for class, was cute as all get out, and carried a book bag which prominently featured a pin with a pink triangle on it. Oh, how I wanted to get to know him, if only to talk. Sure, it might have been fun to experiment with him sexually, but what college fag is going to want to get it on with a newbie? I never got to talk to him, and eventually in my senior I took an off campus apartment instead. My neighbor across the hall was hot, and straight. The first time I met him he had his shirt off, and I almost gasped.

So now as I look back on my college years, I wonder what life would have been like if I had had the nerve to come out back then. If I had tapped into the available support networks on campus to let myself become more comfortable with guys-who-liked-guys. I like to think that I would much more socially developed now. I like to think that perhaps I'd have a bit more confidence in myself, that I would know myself better just because I would have had that much of a head start in the process of self-awareness, that I would have just been happier in general if I had met a boy or two in college.

Then again, had I come out in college, I could have simply turned into the bitter, jaded, and evil person I am now that much sooner.

So this weekend I'm heading back to campus just for the day to see what's changed, what hasn't, and maybe just by chance bump into people I may very well want to say hi to. But as a matter of my personal experience, it's a time for me to return to that time of not-so-innocence, where I can face some demons down, look them in the eye, and say, I lived through my own private hell here, and I made it out alive.