Since I am still occasionally surprised to learn that someone I know or work with hasn’t figured out that I’m gay: my husband (Michael) and I are both men, and we’re very much in love with each other and happy together.
All posts by fontfolly
Friday Links!
It’s National Coming Out Day!
Set some time aside to look at all the pictures and watch the videos: The cave so huge it has its own weather system: Explorers discover a lost world with thick cloud and fogs trapped inside.
The Oatmeal explains: Columbus was an awful person, but Bartolome de la Casa was not.
While that was being shared, other people wanted to remind us: The Oatmeal Sucks, Even if Buzzfeed Was Wrong.
I don’t even know where to begin: Landlord discovers 11-foot python in rental property: undernourished, abandoned, burned because it had wrapped itself around a water heater for warmth. “the second time in a month that law enforcement has asked for assistance from WSU to catch a large snake according to College of Veterinary Medicine officials.”
25 years of National Coming Out Day:
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SCIENCE: JERKS DON’T UNDERSTAND SARCASM.
Public Couple Fights Anti-Gay Bullying and Alleged Censorship.
Why is Betty White changing her name:
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14 beats 11
During the American Revolutionary War (1775-83), the government of the state of Georgia had purchased a large amount of goods on credit from a merchant who lived in South Carolina by the name of Captain Robert Farquhar. At the end of the war, Georgia refused to pay the amount owed Captain Farquhar on the grounds that Farquhar had been a British Loyalist—not on the grounds that the supplies they received had been defective in any way, or that he had otherwise failed to deliver what he promised. It seemed to be nothing more than spite…
Corvair Convertible?
Michael came down sick the day after the con, and more than a week later is still not well. So he had commented Monday evening that I had really lucked out. I didn’t disagree with him outloud, because I did think I was recovering faster than he was, but I also knew I wasn’t well, yet.
Then Tuesday morning we both slept through both alarms, and my head and throat hurt way more than they had on my worst day previously, and I had a fever. So I didn’t go into the office. I worked a bit more than half the day from home, took a couple of naps, and tried to take it easy.
This morning, I woke up before the first alarm. I went to the front door and looked outside, and the day was beautiful: a hint of recent rain in the air, a cool but clear day. I took a shower and proceeded with getting ready. I got to the front door and opened it and it was raining super, super hard, flooded street, and there, trying to maneuver a beautiful, green 1969 Corvair Convertible through the flood waters, was Whoopi Goldberg. Of course, I ran out to try to help her!
And then I started coughing so hard I woke myself up. I rolled over and saw that it was almost time for the second alarm to go off. It took me about five minutes to get it through my head that everything I just wrote about in that paragraph was a dream. I had dreamed that I got up, et cetera, et cetera. Obviously the Whoopi Goldberg part was a dream, but everything before that had been so real.
I still have a fever. Today I have a cough. I’m going to work from home, again.
But the worst part of the dumb dream thing isn’t the disorientation I felt this morning while I trying to wake up and figure out what was real.
It’s the fact that there is no green Corvair convertible parked on our block.
Stripes and stars
My coming out process had been slow and incremental. I spent most of my teens wrestling with the idea, trying to convince myself that I wasn’t gay. For a long time I tried to be either bisexual or resign myself to a life a celibacy. I don’t want to get into the psycho-social reasons that some of us gay people cling to a bisexual identity for a while (and the disservice that does to actual bi people). Julie and I became active in a very out lesbian & gay chorus while we were still married to each other. By then a lot of people knew that I wasn’t heterosexual. But a lot of people didn’t. Most of my friends who knew seemed to be all right with it, but no one in my family knew.
I had wanted to come out to the family (and some old friends who were still in the dark at the time) earlier, but had been talked out of it. After Julie and I legally separated and I was finally able to admit aloud that I was definitely not bi, I felt a need to make a definitive statement.
It’s the thought that counts
The recent remakes of V and True Grit, on the other hand…
So NBC has launched a remake of the ’70s detective series, Ironside, and they cast Blair Underwood in a role based very loosely on the character originated by Raymond Burr. I’ve watched the pilot, and it wasn’t awful. I’m not even sure I would call it bad. But mediocre certainly springs to mind. Supporting characters completely lacking in anything resembling a personality does as well.
Sometimes series (whether books or television) take a while to find their footing, so I’m going to probably give it a few more episodes. But by the time I finished watching the pilot, I needed something to cleanse my brain, and by chance I’ve had the TiVo recording re-runs of another Raymond Burr iconic series, Perry Mason. It was truly a joy to watch a 1962 episode.
One of the things I loved about the classic Mason television series, as well as the books, was how often Mason would quote specific principles of law. For instance, in the episode I watched that night, Della Street, Mason’s secretary, has been accused of aiding and abetting a felony murder which may have been committed by an old friend. Mason points out to the officer that in order for her to be found guilty, they have to prove that she knew her friend had committed a felony before she acted, that she willingly assisted the friend, and that both she and the friend were doing what they were doing with the intent to avoid arrest for the crime.
Which is true of many of our laws. What you’re thinking and why you’re doing what you are doing determine whether the act is a crime. It is seldom just the action, but also the intent. This is a legal principle that has been with us since at least the times of the Ancient Sumerians…
Try to stop me!
The person specifically referenced the post and said they hoped I would keep writing. I hadn’t intended to say anything that indicated I was considering not posting, but I know that sometimes when I’m writing a post in a hurry that I phrase things weird. Even when I’m not in a rush, I make odd typos (the words I type are correctly spelled, but they are the wrong word, usually a related word, but wrong), which can also lead to misunderstanding.
So I re-read the post, and read it again, and couldn’t find anything weird.
Then I got a second email from a different person, with the same sentiment…
Would lose my head if it weren’t attached
I’ll be on my way out the door and realize that I left the travel mug full of coffee that I just made to take with me behind, so I go to get it, and it isn’t in the kitchen where I thought it was, so I have to wander around the house trying to figure out where I set it down. I’ll eventually find it near a light switch I turned off before leaving, and then when I get to the door I’ll realize that I don’t have my keys. The keys that were just in my hand a minute ago before I started looking for the coffee. And don’t think I set the keys down where the coffee mug was, because that would be too easy, no they’re going to be somewhere else entirely.
I’ve managed to waste an entire hour sometimes just trying to find things I had a second ago that I need to take with me on an errand.
So back in August I wasn’t that surprised when I received a box in the mail from a hotel I had stayed at the week before…
Friday Links!
I’ve been a bit out of it all week, recovering from the convention, trying to get back into the swing at work, and then coming down with a head/nose/throat thing. So this week’s links are a bit shorter…
This is from early in the week, so you may have seen it, but Amelia (mother of a 7-year-old who came out when he was 6) asks, “Who is in a gay family?” My favorite line: “And to those who think that my baby boy needs to be fixed: Fuck you. My kid is perfect just they way he is.”
Sad, but worth the read: Children and Guns: The Hidden Toll.
Need a job? Know how to sew? A Wave of Sewing Jobs as Orders Pile Up at U.S. Factories.
Have some Gender-swapped Disney Princesses.
Lewis Black has a hilarious take on the homophobic pasta maker:
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Secret ‘Ex-Gay Awareness Dinner’ Fails Miserably Money quote: “Because.. making a belty, Broadway/Disney-style music video is the perfect way to prove to the world that you’re no longer gay.”
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Lots of people were sharing the “I quit” video posted by Marina Shifrin. This work from home Mom decided to film her own version:
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I’m not sure I want to know
Other times, I’m more than a little bit glad that my site is not providing what they’re looking for, such as earlier in the week when I noticed that someone came to my site using the search term: “moms who want their sons to be sissies…
Font Folly 