Category Archives: life

Never could get the hang of Thursdays

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Surprised-Cat-Popped-BalloonJust as I try not to often post the what-I-had-for-breakfast type of entry on this blog, I also try to avoid let-me-tell-you-about-my-awful-day posts. Besides not wanting to chase readers away with whiny posts, I also feel as if my awful days are never as horrible as other people’s days. I can’t count the times that I have been feeling that I’ve just had a horrific day, when someone I follow on social media will report that a close relative has been diagnosed with a fatal disease, or that they have lost their job, or have been in a car wreck (and they are posting this news from a hospital bed), or any number of other much more serious calamities than my difficulty with a computer program at work. Which makes me feel like an ingrate who doesn’t realize how well I have it.

It’s like most of my bad days are first-world-problems, while many of my friends and associates are mired in real troubles.

But I really do think that last Thursday may have, cumulatively, just barely qualified as a bad day by those other standards… Continue reading Never could get the hang of Thursdays →

March Forth! March Fourth!

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I’ve written before about an acquaintance in college who was shocked that I’d never heard the pun about this day: March Forth! It’s a date and a command!

For the last few years I’ve been observing my own March Forth tradition. I urge you all on this March Forth, to go please donate to The National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.

March forth, and spread the word.

Tending those goals

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When I set my goals for this year, I pledged to continue the things I thought worked last year, which includes posting regular updates. It’s a new month, so here the next report! Like last year, each goal is paired with some specific tasks based on the notion of trying to replace a bad habit with a good one.

So, how did I do…? Continue reading Tending those goals →

Live long and prosper

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“A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. [Live Long And Prosper]”

Leonard Nimoy, 1931-2015

(Source: Leonard’s final tweet after leaving the hospital four days ago.)

From the roots

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© 2015 Gene Breshears
A cherry tree just a few doors down from our place.

There are a lot of cherry trees in our neighborhood. Most of them put forth pink blossoms. A few are white. There’s something about the pink ones that always strike me as more delicate and fragile than the white ones. And a whole row of pink cherry trees covered in flowers is gorgeous.

I noticed this morning that the new shoots coming up from the stump where a split from the trunk had been cut off some time ago were covered in only white blossoms, while the upper branches are all pink. I assume that the main cherry tree is actually a graft of a pink-blooming variety attached to a hardier white-blooming root, and that the new shoots are coming from the root stock.

My big, aggressive pink climbing rose started a similar growth pattern last year. While the grafts that produce huge pink roses has always been very fast growing and very bushy, after 19 years, something made the root ball start sending up new shoots. These new growths go even faster than the graft, though the branches are never as thick or strong. And instead of blooming enormous pink and peach double blossoms, it blooms in tiny white single blossoms. When they fully open they don’t even look like roses.

Lots of plants we humans find useful don’t grow “true” from their seeds. Many of these carefully cross-bred varieties aren’t disease resistant or otherwise are less robust and hardy then the wild, “mongrel” versions, so we graft shoots from the delicate and feeble versions that look the way we want or produce the size of fruit we want, et cetera, onto the root balls of those sturdy and vigorous mongrels. The hardy roots do the hard work of pulling nutrients and water from the soil, fend off underground bugs, fungus, and more, while the parasitic hybrid grafts are visible avoe, gathering sunlight which it uses to convert the carbon dioxide absorbed from the air into carbohydrates to store in the roots (and elsewhere) and new growth.

It is a symbiotic relationship, rather than parasitic, but when the root sends up its new shoots, I always feel as if the oppressed root is trying to live out loud and proud. So I’m going to let my rose grow both types of stalks for at least another year.

Because everyone deserves some time in the sun.

One name, two name, real name, true name

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Me sitting on the hood of a car.
Grandma took this picture of me when I was three or four.
I’ve written more than once about names: the names I’ve been known by, or the names people I’ve known have used. Each time I’ve at least circled around the question of what, precisely, do we mean when we talk about someone’s real name?

You will find a number of people who insist that only one’s legal name can be considered the real name. But being a person who has legally changed his name (and having known a few other people who have done so), I can assure you that there are also a significant number of people who insist that a legally changed name, while certainly legal, is not real. They insist that only the name given by one’s parents at birth is real, and all the rest are counterfeits… Or nicknames, or something. I confess I have trouble understanding their reasoning, because anytime I tried to discuss it with one of these people, they always reverted to insulting or dismissive language. “You’re just changing it to rebel against your parents,” or “So you didn’t like your name? grow a little backbone and embrace it.”

… Continue reading One name, two name, real name, true name →

That’s not the name of the holiday

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usafederalholidays.com
usafederalholidays.com
I’ve written before about the fact that President’s Day is a myth, the official name of the holiday is Washington’s Birthday Observance. Click the link to read about the history of the holiday, the few states that do observe a holiday called President’s Day (though some observe it in completely different months), and so on. Today, I want to talk a little bit about why there has never been a Federal holiday honoring Lincoln’s birthday, and how that contributes to people thinking that today’s holiday is about anyone other than Washington… Continue reading That’s not the name of the holiday →

The War on Valentine’s Day

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6280665297_ebed2a645aParticularly in the online world, February 14th is a terrible mine field. You can’t go online without running into angry rants and bitter commentary about those of us who are happy on this day. If you make the mistake of actually admitting that you are happy and wish other people a happy day, someone’s feelings will be hurt. If you try to avoid the topic altogether, someone will ask you why you’re not waxing eloquent about your husband/boyfriend (or wife/girlfriend or whatever significant others you normally talk about). When I avoided saying anything anywhere online at all one year on February 14, I got an angry message accusing me of being too busy celebrating with my boyfriend to even spare a moment to help some of my single friends feel less unloved.

How can you possibly answer that?

Not that I don’t understand where all these mixed feelings come from. I do. I haven’t always been in a relationship. I got so used to being in the emotional space of being single and not terribly happy about it, that it’s still something of a shock to me every morning to wake up and discover I’m not alone. Even after seventeen wonderful years with Michael. So, yes, I understand what it’s like to be single.

I know what it felt like seeing people happily paired off when I wasn’t. I knew the pain of being completely smitten with someone who was in love with one of my best friends. I knew the double-pain of having a crush on a guy and not being able to share my misery with anyone else or seek sympathy from anyone because not even my closest friends knew I wasn’t straight. So I understand, really, I do, why just seeing Michael and I together being happy can cause someone else heartache.

There were times I felt that heartache. There were times I said something to one of my friends that might have made them feel guilty for being in a relationship. There were times I lashed out, making a snide remark to make them hurt as much as I did. So I understand where the negative comments come from.

I’ve had the incredible luck (and luck does have more than a little bit to do with it) of falling madly and deeply in love with someone who loved me back. When you find that kind of relationship it’s impossible to keep it to yourself. You want people to know what a great person your significant other is. You want to share the joy with your family and friends. Even when you’re a gay man living in a very homophobic society, it’s very difficult to be in love and keep it a secret. So I understand why people want to talk about their relationship with other people they care about.

I don’t need the calendar to remind me to tell Michael I love him. I don’t need a holiday to give me an excuse to buy him presents. More than once we’ve celebrated Valentine’s Day by just taking an exhausted nap together. I don’t think we have ever remembered to make reservations for a dinner at a restaurant on the big day. Michael scolds me for buying flowers on the day because prices are always jacked up. Just a few days ago I asked him if he wanted his Valentine’s gift then (since it had arrived that day), or wanted me to wait until the actual day.

I don’t believe in the so-called coupled ideal. I don’t believe that there is one and only one soulmate out there for everyone. I don’t believe that no one is capable of loving more than one person at a time. And I don’t believe that everyone would be happiest if they were in a relationship with their “one true love.”

But I refuse to feel guilty for being in love. When I was single and made other people feel guilty, their guilt didn’t alleviate my loneliness by one iota. When I lashed out and hurt their feelings, it didn’t get me one step closer to happiness. All that happened was they were hurt, and I wallowed in self-pity.

So, it’s Valentine’s Day. The eve of the Ides of February, which was the beginning of an ancient Roman celebration of fertility and purity (hard for some people to believe those go together). Some parts of the Roman festival were rather shocking to the prudish sensibilities of the early Catholic church, which is probably the reason that a pope declared Feb. 14 the Feast of St. Valentine in 498 AD. The oldest surviving Valentine Greeting (a love letter which specifically mentions St. Valentine’s Day as a day to celebrate one’s love) is a letter written by the Duke of Orleans to his wife in 1415, while she was imprisoned in the Tower of London (take that, everyone who claims the holiday was invented by greeting card companies; in fact it was the other way around).

For the last several years, the biggest celebration we’ve done on Valentine’s Day is meeting up with a bunch of friends to celebrate our friend Jared’s birthday. It’s an evening of laughter and love with a diverse group—some single, some not. The important thing is that we’re together and not mired in bitterness nor guilt.

I remember…

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Gene and Michael standing in a living room.
Picture taken at my Aunt Silly’s house circa 1999.
I don’t remember the exact moment I fell in love with Michael.

I remember meeting him, at the Northwest Science Fiction Convention, in 1996. I remember meeting him at a room party I was co-hosting. He tells me we actually met the day before, at a panel discussion. I do remember discussing the cute, shy guy from Missouri with Ray after the party. I remember meeting him again, a year later, at NorWesCon. I remember him showing up for a Red Dwarf Marathon Party Ray and I hosted a couple months later, and because by the time the party ended there were no more buses going back to Tacoma, he crashed at our place and we drove him home the next day. By that point, he and Ray had bonded like they had known each other for years. So we started seeing him a lot more often.

When Ray died suddenly (only days after the doctors had given a cautiously optimistic report on how the second round of chemo had gone), Michael was one of many friends who kept me from falling completely to pieces in the aftermath… Continue reading I remember… →

Get them to the church on time

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AlaMarriageThe New Yorker calls it “The Moment for Marriage in Alabama,” while the Religion News Service says, “[the] Handwriting [is] on the wall for gay marriage.”

And they’re both right, at least in the big picture sense. Though we must remember the proverbial warning about counting chicks before they’re hatched. It is clear which way the arc of history is going, but Alabama shows us yet another example of how smooth sailing isn’t in the immediate future—even though In 17 Words, Justice Clarence Thomas All But Declared Marriage Equality Inevitable.

Lots of people have drawn a parallel between the Alabama Chief Justice’s declaration that state officials don’t have to follow the federal court orders about marriage equality to George Wallace’s refusal to let schools integrate racially back in the 1950s. Enough people have drawn that parallel that now op-Ed prices are being written to claim that it isn’t merely “Alabama being Alabama.” According to those pundits, this is somehow not merely prejudice but a manifestation of a deeper-seeded conflict between local and state control versus federal control.

The only way you can make such a ridiculous argument is to be completely ignorant of the history of the struggle for racial equality. Because the argument that it wasn’t prejudice but rather a states’ right claim is exactly what Governor Wallace and the other opponents of segregation and the civil rights movement claimed at the time.

Alabama isn’t the only state where officials are fighting tooth-and-nail against equality for gay people, so in that sense it isn’t just Alabama being Alabama—but it is most definitely bigots being bigoted. If the opponents of LGBT rights were merely (and really) concerned with local control, they wouldn’t (at the same time as they’re making these states’ rights arguments) also be passing state laws to overturn individual cities’ gay rights ordinances.

So, the haters are gonna hate. They’re going to lie and defy. They’ll impede and interfere. But in the end they’re going to lose. Justice will triumph. Equality with reign. Love will prevail.

So, get those lesbian and gay couples to a church, chapel, or courthouse, and let love win the day! And then, let’s dance!

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here!)