I just want to stay under the covers.My friend, Barb, referred to the weird lingering cold, maybe flu, maybe multiple colds that seems to be hitting a lot of people as “the Martian flu,” and I’ve decided it’s a great name. I want to mention that said friend lives 1400 miles away, in Arizona. Another friend who reports a similar phenomenon in his community in January, lives 2200 miles away, in Texas. And another friend who reported it in her area lives 2800 miles away, in North Carolina. I mention this because I’ve had a couple of conversations with other long distance acquaintances where I mention the illness running around my office, where they’ve said, “I’m glad I’m not in Seattle!”
The thing is that I’ve been sick nearly continuously since the end of December, and so have a lot of people I know. We’ll be really sick with a certain constellation of symptoms for a few days, start to get better for a few days. Then we’ll have a couple days where we don’t feel completely, 100% healthy, but definitely nearly well. And then a slightly different constellation of symptoms will hit is full bore, and the cycle will begin again.
So, when I was up all night with symptoms that you do not want me to describe Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, I felt an awful lot like that bowl of flowers in the Hitchhiker’s Guide books: “Oh, no. Not again!”…Continue reading Martian flu trumps Writers’ Night→
The birthday boy gabbing before opening a present. Scotty on the left.We celebrated Jared’s birthday last night at AFK Tavern. Friday is my usual work from home day, and my husband came home from his work early because he’s sick (he handed me a beautiful bouquet and said, “I got you some plant sex organs.” I love him so!). I had taken a sick day earlier in the week, and come home early myself on Thursday (though I took a short nap, logged in and worked from home for a couple more hours, took a longer nap, then worked some more, then went to bed). So I hadn’t been certain I would go to the party until just before leaving. Michael stayed home, sleeping.
It’s a beautiful Friday which happens to be Zorkfox’s birthday. It is entirely appropriate that a man with such a large heart celebrates his natal day on February 14.
Here’s a collection of news and other things that struck me as worthy of being shared:
The least scathing review I found of the remake of Robocop began, “It wasn’t bad enough to make me angry.” Another review recommended that instead of spending money to go see the blockbuster-budget remake, to instead watch this crowd-sourced Robocop remake for free: Our Robocop Remake. “As big fans of the original RoboCop, and as filmmakers and film fans admittedly rolling our eyes at the Hollywood remake machine, we’ve elected to do this remake thing our own way. Our RoboCop Remake premiered in Los Angeles on January 26th and New York on February 5th. On February 6th, it was released online. Because if anyone is going to ruin RoboCop, it’s us.”
Together forever.We’ve never made a super big deal out of Valentines Day. I think we’ve both had more fun, the last couple of years, meeting up with friends to celebrate Jared’s birthday, instead of doing the Valentine’s thing. Nor have we ever been really over the top on any of our anniversaries. In fact, both of us frequently forget them altogether. It could be argued that it’s because we have too many. One reason we have so many is because for the longest time, we couldn’t agree on what constituted our anniversary, since we weren’t able to legally marry until very recently. I favored February 7, as the anniversary of our first date. Michael leaned toward Easter, because we first met (nearly three years before that first date) at the NorthWest Science Fiction Convention on an Easter weekend. There was also a strong argument to be made for the date we signed and notarized the domestic partnership papers and had a party with friends, of course.
Now that we are finally legally hitched (and given what a struggle it has been to get it legal here), shouldn’t our wedding anniversary be the one we observe?
Or course, it’s impossible to forget about Valentine’s Day. I know this because I have been told many, many, many times by various people how the way our society deals with Valentine’s Day amounts to oppression or even abuse of people who are not in a relationship…Continue reading What’s the big deal about Valentine’s Day?→
I had something else planned for today, but between being sick (again? still? I have no idea), and long hours, I’m going to leave it to others:
To truly master the Way
we must pass through all life’s hellish cycles;
at last, we reach the higher heights.
Only three things necessary for paradise after all:
endurance, alertness,
and a righteous heart.
A kitty and his teddy bear.I’ve written before about some of the disasters in my early attempts at dating. In some ways those disasters seemed worse than usual because most of them happened in my late twenties and early thirties. I didn’t date much in high school, and what dating I did do was with the gender I wasn’t actually attracted to, and while some things about navigating relationships are universal, there is a big difference between the awkwardness of trying to learn how to make things click with someone you’re attracted to, rather than the awkwardness of trying to make yourself feel desire for someone when there wasn’t any underlying physical attraction at all.
For a while I thought things were going so badly simply because I was playing catch-up. Other people had made these kinds of mistakes as teenagers, whereas I hadn’t. Other times I wondered if maybe the cliches about most gay men not wanting commitment had a grain or more of truth (this despite the fact that I was also hanging out with gay couples who had been together for many years). I wondered if I’d just had bad luck and kept meeting guys who only wanted a fling.
And then, eventually, I had to admit the truth: that the only thing all the failed relationships had in common was me, and I needed to figure out what I was doing wrong…Continue reading Love is in the bear→
There are many differences between my story and Dan’s (besides his being famous, and me not). Michael and I have not adopted, for instance. I have never, ever wanted to live in New York City (visits have been fine, but live there? Never!). And so on.
When people talked about how beautiful the mountains are, it was more of a “meh” for me than a “WTF.” I grew up in the central Rocky Mountain states. Mountains are supposed to always be there, being beautiful. It’s flat places (and how anyone can stand to live there) that always baffle me…Continue reading How I learned to love the city→
The U.S. hypocrisy over Russia’s anti-gay laws. On one level, I’ve been saying stuff like this for a while. I do quibble with that fact that in none of the states with similar “don’t say gay laws” are the police going around beating gay people and throwing them in jail en masse.
Coca-Cola’s “It’s Beautiful” Super Bowl Ad Brings Out Some Ugly Americans. You’ve probably already seen this, but I think it’s funny that the wingnuts are so busy being upset about “America the Beautiful” lyrics not in English, that they are failing to get apoplectic about the gay men ice skating with their daughter.
Who, us?I’ve told the story more than once of the friend in high school who got angry at me over some family photographs. My mom had decided to change things up in the living room and had hung a bunch of old family photos on the wall. Among them were some pictures from when my parents were teen-agers hanging out with family and friends. There was also a photo of my paternal grandparents from their wedding day. My friend saw those particular pictures and thought that they were pictures of me. He specifically thought they had been taken at one of those amusement park or similar places where you and friends can put on some costume pieces and get a photo filtered in a way to look like an old sepia-tone photo from the late 1800s.
When I explained to my friend that the guy he thought was me in one of the pictures was my dad, and the guy in another was my grandpa, he didn’t believe me. And when I wouldn’t change my story as he demanded again and again that I admit I was joking, he angrily stormed out of the house and refused to talk to me for several days, until my mom confirmed the story…
What’s a hater to do?The song, “America, the Beautiful” got an entire day’s lesson in the Colorado State History class I had to pass in ninth grade. Katherine Lee Bates, an English professor from Wellesley College, came to Colorado Springs in 1893 to teach a summer class at Colorado College. As her train rolled across the plains of eastern Colorado, drawing closer to the dramatic front line of the Rocky Mountains spread across the horizon, she wrote in her journal about the landscape she was passing. Colorado Springs is near the base of Pike’s Peak, one of the taller mountains in the Rockies, and one day Bates took an excursion by train and then mule to the peak of the mountain, where she later said she felt as if all the beauty of America was laid before her, and inspired a poem to form in her mind. She eventually submitted the poem, entitled “Pike’s Peak” to a publication called The Congregationalist. When it was published in the July 4th edition in 1895, appeared under the title, “America the Beautiful.”
We learned that and other facts about the subsequent versions of the poem Bates re-published, and how it was eventually set to music by Samuel A. Ward, in class. What the textbook failed to mention is that Katherine Lee Bates was almost certainly lesbian…Continue reading …with brotherhood?→
Font Folly 