Category Archives: life

Just us guys

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How upset some guys get about sharing locker rooms and showers with gay guys would be funny if it didnt lead so often to harassment and assault.

I just want to ask them a simple pair of related questions: are mobs of women you don’t know throwing themselves at you, trying to jump your bones? If not, why do you assume that every gay man is going to be trying to force themselves on you?

There’s an answer, but it isn’t a very pretty one. The truth is that the kinds of straight guys who are weirded out/uncomfortable/angry1 at the thought of having to share a locker room, shower, or even a gym with gay guys know how they treat women they are attracted to. They assume that all straight men think that way about women, so they also assume that all gay men will think that way about them.

And they don’t like it2.

That’s not the only source of their discomfort. There’s also the loss of the “just us guys” environment—a space where guys are safe to be guys. A place where they can scratch where it itches, can make inappropriate jokes, and generally be uncivilized. It would be easy to point out how a little less uncivilized behavior, along with less affirmation of a lot of sexist attitudes, would be a good thing in the long run. And I think it will be a good thing over time.

But there is also some value to that safe place. Just as it is valuable for women to have safe places to talk about their issues without guys like me saying, “Hey! We’re not all like that” or other guys “man-splaining3.” And it’s valuable for gay people to have safe places to talk about our issues without other people insisting they’re “not all like that” or trying to “str8-splain.”

Guys need places where they can be guys.

Now, I’m the first to say that a lot of what currently is presumed to be “guys just being guys” is awful and needs to change. Even when I was participating in several sports back in middle school, there was a certain amount of dread that fell on me whenever it was time to go to the locker room, or go out on the field. Any time you screwed up or failed to be as good at something as another guy, you were called a faggot, or queer, or pussy.

And that was only the nicer coaches5.

The mean coaches and the other kids called you c*cksucker, bitch, and c*nt—in various combinations. One of my middle school tormenters was fond of “c*cksucking, sh*teating fag.”

Guys of all sexual orientations and abilities are harmed by those notions that equate masculinity with athleticism, sexuality, and competitiveness. This notion enforces the hierarchy that equates the amount of respect one is entitled to is determined by the degree to which one possesses those masculine traits (which means that women will automatically never be able to expect as much respect as a man). Even the guys who have found success by embracing this notion have done so by contorting their personality in various ways, cutting themselves out of a lot of what’s great about being a person along the way.

So shaking up that definition is a good thing.

But it doesn’t have to mean that all distinctions between masculine and feminine are going to go away. It doesn’t mean that those of us in the LGBT community think they should6. It just means that there are a lot of different kinds of guys—lots of different ways to be a man. And all those different kinds of guy can hang out and be one of the guys, and all of the guys can be okay with it.

At least I hope so. Because my husband hates it when I start talkin’ about football, and I just need somewhere that I can…

1. Angry in this case is just code for afraid. Guys aren’t allowed to be afraid, so our subconscious transforms the fear into anger.

2. One would hope that this discomfort would help some of them to see that maybe they should start thinking of women a little differently, no?

3. mansplaining: condescending, inaccurate explanations delivered with a rock solid confidence of rightness and that slimy certainty that of course he is right, because he is the man in this conversation4.

4. Some people define mansplaining exclusively as that sort of condescending explanation by a man to a woman, especially about topics related to women’s rights, and so on. But a lot of mansplaining is guy-on-guy. And none of us are immune. Guys are socialized to be confident and assertive, no matter what.

5. The coach who taught Sunday school and who made you put a quarter in the swearing jar on his desk if he heard you say “hell” or “damn” used “fag” so much, you began to wonder if he thought it was a punctuation mark. And don’t get me started on the teacher who was also a pastor.

6. I suspect some trans people have more to say about that than I possibly could.

Why I hate hay fever, reason #5821

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Sometime in the wee small hours, an alarm went off. My befuddled, barely awake brain was arguing about whether it was a fire alarm or the Emergency Broadcast System while I was stumbling around the dark house, trying to find what had made the noise.

Both TVs are off, and the alarm had stopped and I couldn’t find anything in the house that was smoking, ominously glowing, or otherwise in a disturbing state.

My head hurt, but I wasn’t entirely sure that it wasn’t merely because I had been awakened from a sound sleep. I crashed back into bed.

About an hour later I woke up, and my mouth was so dry it hurt. My headache was much, much worse. I lurched and stumbled my way to the kitchen, guzzled a glass of water, then refilled and drank some more water, and tried to make myself think. Everything seemed foggy, and I suddenly remembered the alarm from before. Maybe I couldn’t find what was wrong because whatever it was was happening in one of the other apartments, and smoke was slowly filling all the units?

I went to the front door and opened it. The cold air felt good, but didn’t seem to be any less foggy than the air inside the house. I concluded that everything looking foggy was just a combination of me not being fully awake, and the usual blurriness of not having my glasses.

My mouth still felt terribly parched, even though I’d had two large glasses of water. I went to the kitchen, had another glass of water. By which point the bad feeling of the dry mouth had lessened enough that the sinus headache was more noticeable. So I took some cold tablets, drank some more water, and collapsed back into bed.

By the time I woke up for real, it was clear that I was having really bad hay fever. I took some more meds. When I went to get some more water, I found my phone on the counter. There were two amber alert messages, the first at 3:30 am. The phones make a noise similar to the Emergency Broadcast System alert sound when the emergency alerts come through. That must have been what I heard. And it had sounded like it might be coming from either the kitchen or the living room because, by chance, both Michael and I had left our phones off the chargers. Mine was left in the kitchen, his in the living room.

Michael is also having a horrid hay fever day. We’ve both taken naps. All of my sleeping periods since the stupid alarm have included dreams about fires and explosions and the like. Earlier I told Michael I blame the alarms, but the hay fever contributes. In my bad dreams about fires and explosions, I keep getting eye and head injuries, for instance, which I take as my subconscious trying to figure out why my head and eyes hurt so dang much.

Plus, severe hay fever just messes you up. It isn’t just the drugs that make your brain go woodgie1. The histamine cascade causes changes in blood vessels, releases various enzymes, and other systemic changes. When you throw meds to deal with the pain or sinus pressure on top of that, it should be no surprise that one’s mental processes function differently than usual.

And I hate it!

1. Yes, that’s a technical term.

Everyone needs a hobby, but…

life,

When I first moved into this neighborhood, 17 years ago, there was the shell of an Alfa Romeo on blocks in the driveway of a house down the block. It was missing at least one door, parts of the body were rusted out, that sort of thing. Over the years, I have watched it slowly be reconstructed. It’s kind of cool to see. I’ve even seen the owner driving it up the street once. In fact, that’s the only time I’ve ever seen the owner’s face.

But it hasn’t all been cool.

His driveway slopes steeply down to the basement garage. At the other end it slopes down from the sidewalk to the street. So the only flat spot he has to work on the car is the sidewalk itself. And because he has thorny bushes on his property, and there’s a low sprawling cheery tree on the planting strip, when he has left it parked on the sidewalk (sometimes for days at a time) walking around it isn’t trivial.

Since every morning I have to walk that way to get to the bus, then back again after work, it was a bit annoying.

I sympathise. He has this (potentially) nice car he’s trying to restore, but the sidewalk is a public right of way. Technically, it’s a ticketable offense to block the sidewalk. Heck, a neighbor on the next block was cited for the lower tree branches that blocked the sidewalk there at about my chin level and up (and since I’m shorter than average, that meant everyone but small children had to crouch or duck to walk along that part of the sidewalk.

Most of the time the car is parked on the little bit that slopes from the sidewalk to the street. It doesn’t quite fit. The tail end of the car sticks out into the sidewalk, but you can walk through all right.

Some years go I remember a couple of days when not only was the car blocking the sidewalk, but a big tarp covered with car parts was spread out along the sidewalk. There have been numerous times when it was parked just off the sidewalk but various electrical cords and/or hoses were strung up from the garage to the car. Again, something I can step over, but a bit of a barrier to people pushing a stroller or a cart. And a trip hazard for anyone.

A few months ago we came home one night and found that the car had rolled into the middle of the narrow atreet, completely blocking it. We and the car behind us had to back up and go around the block. While I was unloading our car, once we got home, Michael walked down to knock on the owner’s door and help push the car back into the driveway.

Then one morning this week, just as I was about to get into the shower, I hear a horn start blaring. It wasn’t a “beep-beep-beep” of an alarm or someone pressing their “where did I park it” button. It just blared steadily.

After a minute of it going, I pulled my sweats back on and stepped outside. A couple other neighbors were just coming out. Of course, I’d been in a hurry, so I didn’t have shoes nor had I grabbed my glasses. I hadn’t heard a thud or crash before it started, but I was half expecting to see some kind of accident down the road. I couldn’t see anything.

A neighbor with a two-year-old in her arms said, “I can’t see any obvious cause. It’s like in a movie, someone just slumped over, head hitting the wheel?”

I went back inside for shoes and my glasses, then walked down the street.

Of course it was the Alfa Romeo. No one was in it. It was just sitting there, blaring.

I knocked on the door of the owner’s house. After a minute, an annoyed voice asked through the door. “What do you want?”

“Is this your car out here blaring?”

“I don’t know! Is it my car?”

I stopped myself from saying something crude. “I don’t know! It’s in front of your house!”

“Okay. I’ll be out in a minute.”

One of the neighbors who lives further away than I did had stumbled out in a robe and slippers. It wasn’t that early in the morning (I go in a little later and work into the early evening, myself). The blaring was loud enough to wake up someone at the other end of the block. And I didn’t pound on the door. I just knocked normally. I was trying really hard not to be Angry Man, so I was careful to just knock.

Since he heard the knocking, there was no way that he hadn’t been able to hear his own car, right under his window, blaring its horn for four or five minutes. What the heck did he mean, sarcastically asking “I don’t know! Is it my car?”

Even now, I still have only seen his face that one time he drove the car up the street while I was weeding our lawn. The only reason I even looked up from the weeding was because the car was coughing and sputtering and sounding like the engine was going to either explode or die any minute. It lurched up the block and out of sight. Minutes later the sound fading as he kept going somewhere in it. I’ve seen his legs sticking out from under the car while he’s working on it. I’ve seen his silhouette at night coming out to deal with the car. So I don’t know him.

All I know is he’s been working on this car for nearly two decades, he’s only gotten it into barely working order briefly a few years ago. He’s had a string of cheap cars that look like junkyard rejects parked at the curb in front of his house (and occasionally in the driveway behind the Alfa). His yard is always overgrown. And he blocks the sidewalk with rather tiresome frequency.

I don’t want to tell him how to live his life. But I really, really, really wish he’d pick a different hobby.

Over prepared

life, ,

I come from a long line of worriers. Some of them were world-class fretters, constantly obsessing over the most unlikely things. I’m not a fretter. The worrying tendencies manifest in me as being over prepared.

For instance, even though the battery of my smartphone normally has no problem lasting through a day at work and an evening of dinner with friends afterward, I have a case that contains a spare battery which can recharge the phone from absolutely dead to more than 80%. Plus, in my backpack I carry adapter cables so that I can recharge either the phone inside the case, or the phone and case simultaneously using USB ports on a computer. And I carry a small adaptor for charging directly if there is no computer. And finally, The backpack also contains an external battery and adaptors that, if there is no power at all, can recharge my smartphone and power a dead laptop for about four hours.

And I’m not sure I have enough of my bases covered.

I know this is paranoid overkill.

The backpack has a spare two day supply of my prescription meds just in case. Plus a collection of over-the-counter allergy meds, tylenol, and other minor medications. During the cold part of the year there’s a pair of gloves and a stocking cap always in there, along with a pair of sunglasses that will fit over my eyeglasses. In the warm parts of the year the gloves and hat are replaced by a slightly rain-proof windbreaker.

And you don’t want to know how many pairs of eyeglasses I have and where…

I also misplace things. All the time. I can lose, find, and re-lose a set of keys ten times in less than ten minutes. So I have spares of lots of things, because sometimes you don’t have time to spend twenty minutes figuring out where something is.

I know that preparing for hypothetical difficulties is an attempt to control the future. Which is uncontrollable. On the other hand, the quirks it manifests as for me aren’t disruptive to other people’s lives, doesn’t interfere with my ability to interact with friends and family, and it means I’m not stressing over things I can’t control. At least I’m not likely to worry myself into a heart attack.

Besides, watching me unpack my backpack looking for something causes some of my friends great mirth. And the world can always use more laughter.

Right?

Not so recent

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Back in the early ’90s, when I was active with the Seattle Lesbian & Gay Chorus, we had some sort of social at a member’s house. Our host and his partner were showing us around, when someone commented on the photos hanging on the wall of an incredibly adorable kid. “Is that your nephew?”

“No,” our host said. “That’s my son. Here he is with his two moms. And here’s one of all of us.”

He proceeded to tell the story of how a friend he had known “since school” had one day asked him if he would donate the sperm so that she and her partner could have a child. “The next thing I knew, I was explaining to my boyfriend at the time about how in a couple months we’d have to go about a week or two without sex to maximum my sperm count.”

They were doing it without the help of a clinic. So, as he said, he had to “produce a sample” at the appointed time, and a friend who had been recruited for the purpose drove the container across town to where the lesbian couple were waiting. It all had to be timed around when she was most likely to be ovulating, of course. Then they had to wait for a number of weeks to see if it worked.

It didn’t.

So they tried again. And again.

“By this point I suspect we were driving all our friends crazy, because we were all paying attention to her menstrual cycle and talking about it in inappropriate places!”

Eventually, they decided that the problem was probably that the drive time was too long for the sperm to remain viable. So, he said, one night he and his boyfriend went over to their house. She and the friend who was assisting with the equipment were in one bedroom, and he and his boyfriend were in another—”He was getting a bit tired of all these bouts of no sex leading up to each try”—and the gal’s partner waited outside the door to take the specimen jar once it was ready.

“It wasn’t romantic for any of us!”

But that time it worked. And ten years later, the lesbian couple were still happily raising their son, with the occasional help of the friend who had donated the sperm.

I was reminded of this story while listening to this story on one of the local NPR stations.

It also made me think about those comments during the Supreme Court hearings a couple weeks back where a couple of the justices kept referring to gay parenting and gay-headed families as a recent development. One justice insisted that the very idea was “newer than cell phones.”

The first analog cellular network went active in 1979, but no one called the large, brick-like phones (some of them were closer to the size of a briefcase) a cellphone. The phones small enough to fit easily in a pocket came out in 1991. About nine years after the birth of the boy whose story I began this post with.

And that wasn’t when gay parenting began. The American Psychological Association published one famous peer-reviewed multi-year study on the outcomes of children raised by gay and lesbian parents in 1970, for goodness sake!

When I was first coming out of the closet, in the late ’80s, a rather large percentage of the lesbians I met had children. Some of my “lesbian aunties*” had children who were older than I was, and those children had children of their own. A slightly smaller percentage of the gay men I met at that time also had children, some of them with children of their own, as well.

Most of those gay and lesbian parents I knew back then had married young while they were still struggling with their sexual identity, and the children were the result of the marriage. Because of various inequities in child custody laws in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, the majority of those children were in the physical custody of their mothers. So I knew of a lot more kids who had been raised by lesbian mothers than those who had been raised by their gay fathers.

On the other hand, one of the adults I knew back then had been raised by an actual lesbian aunt and her aunt’s partner after her own parents had died when she was a baby.

Bottom line: gay, lesbian, and bisexual people have been raising children for many generations. It isn’t a recent idea.

And as to whether gay marriage is a recent idea? Well, the Roman Emperor Constantius II issued what was probably the very first legal ban on gay marriage back in the year 324 A.D. If they decided they needed to explicitly ban it, and then later add the death penalty to the punishment, then gay marriages had to have been happening before that, right?

* Not my actual aunts. These were older lesbian women who sort of adopted me when I was coming out.

A beach, a blanket, and a song

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I’m not quite old enough to remember the original Mickey Mouse Club. It was cancelled almost exactly a year before I was born. Three years after cancellation, the original hour-log recordings were edited down to half-hour segments that were shown in syndication for a few years, and my Mom said I watched it fairly faithfully. I don’t know how much of my memories of the show are from that exposure, because those edited episodes was re-re-released into syndication around the time I was in middle school. I watched some of those episodes, though if my friends caught me, I claimed that I was just watching it to humor my younger sister.

I was already an Annette Funicello fan before. I remember her most from the Beach Party movies co-starring her and Frankie Avalon. When I was in grade school, before modern cable systems, when most places had only three or four stations, there always seemed to be one of those stations that ran movies in the afternoons. Silly comedies were a staple of those afternoon movies, so Beach Party, Muscle Beach Party, Bikini Beach, Pajama Beach, Beach Blanket Bingo, and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini made frequent appearances.

The movies were extremely silly, with outlandish plots. Despite being movies about kids spending a summer at the beach and the ensuing romantic soap opera, a lot of them had at least one sci fi/fantasy element (the professor’s ability to paralyze someone by touching a “nerve-cluster” at the temple, the “improved” chimpanzee that could surf and dance better than a human, a Martian teen-ager sent to the beach as an advance scout for an interplanetary invasion, a mermaid falls in love with one of the surfers, and Frankie hires a witch doctor is to send a sea nymph to the beach to keep the other guys away from Annette while he’s in the Navy).

Not exactly high-concept, but probably a big part of the appeal to grade-school-aged me.

She was in a few of the sillier Disney films of the sixties, as well (The Shaggy Dog, The Misadventures of Merlin Jones, and The Monkey’s Uncle).

In all of those movies she played the wholesome good girl. The girl any boy would be lucky to have. Setting aside all the levels of sexism in that, it meant when I was a kid, I wanted to be her. I didn’t consciously admit it. I’m sure that to some of the adults in my life they assumed that I learned all the lyrics to all of her songs, et cetera, because I had a crush on her. (And for the record, I didn’t have a crush on Frankie; his pretty boy persona was totally not my type.)

So I’ve always had very fond memories of Annette and was sad to read that she died. I’m a bit miffed that news of her death has been overshadowed by reporting about the death of a certain former British Prime Minister. I certainly understand why the latter is considered more newsworthy.

Good-bye, Annette. I hope that somewhere you’re strolling along a beautiful beach, surrounded by love and music.

“I’m looking for pie”

life,

In the middle of the day Wednesday, my mom sent me a picture of a plant she’d found growing in front of her house and asked if I knew what it was.

Mom's mystery plant
Mom’s mystery plant
I replied “Rhubarb?” Because that’s what it looked like, right?
A reference image from the web of one variety of rhubarb.
A reference image from the web of one variety of rhubarb.
There are other things it could be, but rhubarb seemed a reasonable guess.

At about the same time I was looking at the picture Mom sent, my husband sent me a text, explaining that he had come home from work sick. Somehow, my reply to Mom went to Michael instead. I didn’t realize it until sometime later when Michael replied, “Heh. Sure, I guess!”

So I had to re-send my answer to Mom, and send an explanation to Michael that I had actually been answering Mom.

During my walk home from work, I kept thinking about the rhubarb. I felt as if I had raised Michael’s hopes for some pie, only to dash them when I explained that I’d been talking to Mom. So I stopped at one of the grocery stores near our house, one that often carries pies which are made without added sugar (most fruit actually doesn’t need it) and with a whole grain crust. I had been thinking it was still a little early in the year to be finding rhubarb pies, but, lo and behold, there was a no-sugar added strawberry-rhubarb pie. So I grabbed it and a container of vanilla non-fat frozen yogurt and headed home.

I also picked up a few different options of the comfort-food variety for dinner. Though when I showed Michael what I’d picked out, I pointed out that depending on how much comfort he wanted, we could just split the pie for dinner. Instead, he picked mac and cheese, with pie for dessert.

All day at work I’d been feeling inexplicably grumpy. At home that night, I tried to get some writing done, but just couldn’t string words together. Thursday morning when the alarm went off, I felt as if I hadn’t slept in days and my stomach was hurting. A lot. I checked my temperature and I had a low-grade fever. So I called in sick and crashed back into bed.

When I woke up a few hours later I felt less awful. Not better, but less awful. I stumbled into the kitchen, looking for some juice. I saw the pie we’d cut into the night before, and the sudden realization that I could have pie for breakfast made me feel that life might just be worth living, after all.

So, pie for breakfast, then pie again for dessert that night. And I picked up a couple more small pies (different flavors, this time), because we both seemed to be enjoying it so much.

When we were next in the grocery store together, Michael headed into the bakery section after we’d gotten other things on our list. I asked him why.

“I’m looking for pie.”

When I pointed out that we hadn’t, yet finished off all the pie we had, he said, “I know. But we will, and we’ll want some more, after.”

Of course, he was right. He almost always is.

Taxes

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We once again put off doing our taxes.

I don’t mind paying taxes. Really. Unlike some people, I recognize that we’re generally safe in our homes and can count on our money being useful to purchase goods and services because of government functions ranging from the local police and fire departments all the way out to federal reserve and the armed forces. That’s not the grumble.

For most of my life (with a couple of exceptions), my taxes have been fairly simple. Unfortunately, for the last three years that hasn’t been the case. Because when voters in my state approved “everything but the name marriage” domestic partnerships a few years ago (and full-fledged marriage last year), they granted community property rights to us, but the federal Defense of Marriage Act forbids the IRS from calling it a marriage, we’re required to file as Single, but we’re also required to report each other’s income.

The first year this was true caught everyone by surprise (a lot of IRS employees didn’t understand why these strange returns were coming in, and sent back letters threatening fines for “frivolously false” filings), so none of the usual free online services (nor the paid software) knew how to handle it. It took Michael and I several hours to sort things out. And if some gay rights organizations hadn’t posted instructions and links to the correct obscure IRS documents, it would have taken a lot longer.

Last year, which was the second year this was required for citizens of a bunch of states, the software services (and some of the walk-in-and-pay-us places) still couldn’t handle it. But since we’d done it once before, and had saved copies of everything, we were able to do it ourselves with much less hassle.

This year, the third year (and with even more states qualifying), I had been pleased to read some reviews that indicated at least one of the common software solutions could handle it.

The reviews lie.

Once I did figure out what the misleading instructions actually meant (both the software interface and the instructions extremely poorly designed), the software would literally not let me back to the dialog box where I needed to change the number unless I deleted the entire form and started over.

Fortunately, they have a simple form on their website to request a refund.

If I had just set out to do it ourselves as before, I would have had a much less cranky afternoon.

The really dumb thing is that most of the reason why I would like to use the software is because both of us have atrocious handwriting. With any luck, the Defense of Marriage Act will finally be gone next year, and we’ll be able to just do the simple “Married Filing Jointly” form.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

My afternoon cuppa

life,

At work I drink the coffee provided in the kitchen in the mornings. They have a big grinder that is set to deliver a measured amount of grounds, and the coffee selected isn’t bad. There are enough of us drinking coffee that the pots usually contain reasonably fresh coffee throughout the morning.

I switch to tea in the afternoon. I don’t really remember when or why I started doing it. It was before I came to work at this place. And usually I make the tea using stuff from my private stash, rather than the variety of teabags provided in the kitchen.

One of my co-workers, who grew up in China, seriously dislikes the very notion of tea bags. Sometimes you can even get her to explain why loose leaves are better (you can actually see and smell the quality, for one). That’s not why I keep my own stash. Mine are bags, after all. Yes, some of the teas I bring in at least look more like a pinch of loose leaves inside a little cloth baggie, rather than unidentifiable clippings inside paper, but it’s still teabags.

I just have certain teas that I like, and they aren’t the kind that get stocked in an office kitchen. My very favorite is a lavender-earl grey. Alas, it hasn’t been in stock for months at the store where I used to get it. Which means I’ve been drinking a lot of my second fave: jasmine blossom green tea. Or aged earl grey. Or sweet ginger black.

I try to keep two or three varieties in stock in my desk, so that I always have a choice. But I’ve lately been having trouble finding good versions of my alternates. I probably just need to shop further afield. At least I hope that’s all it is. I hope there hasn’t been some sort of global lavender or bergamot shortage. More my luck that not enough other people like it to justify shipping the product.

That happens with a lot of things I like. When I find something I like, I want to keep enjoying it. Yet what makes products fly off the shelf (or at least one of the things that makes this happen) is being new and different. In order to make room for new and different, something has to go, at least temporarily. Of course, I’m as much a part of that problem as anyone. Before I discovered the lavender earl grey tea, one of my faves was this rspberry black tea—the bags had little dried raspberries mixed with the tea leaves, and the taste was incredible. I stopped buying it when I started drinking the lavender, and I didn’t even notice that the raspberry wasn’t on the shelf any more.

It doesn’t just happen with teas, of course. I am a sucker for the serial story. Whether it be a good television series or series of novels. I love coming back to find out what happens next to characters I have come to love (or love to hate in the case of a well-done villain). It’s probably why when I’m working on a novel, I’m also thinking about the sequel. I just can’t help it.

Though lately I think it’s gotten me into a bit of a jam. I keep having scenes that have nothing to do with the current plot—scenes that can’t happen until after the end of this novel—popping into my head when I’m trying to work on this one. I gotta figure out how to get them out of the way so I can finish the story at hand.

I’ll let you know if I find a magic solution…

It is April, and sometimes I am a fool…

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…but I am not posting an April Fools’ Day joke.

I have done a few. In college as member of the editorial board of two different campus papers, I helped produce a few April Fool’s Day editions. On my old LiveJournal I am still rather proud of the post I wrote explaining why I had decided to become a Gay Republican and start actively working to oppress myself.

If I were to do an April Fool’s Day post, I would adhere to the following rules:

  • I plan it out in advance, giving myself time to edit it a time or two before it is posted.
  • The topic is not something that will make people worry (nothing about fake injuries or illness, not pretending to be angry at my friends, anything like that)
  • The butt of the joke needs to be me

I have, over the years since I started blogging, only come up with a few that met those conditions. Even though I tried to pick things that I didn’t think would upset someone, I managed to do so two of those times—the opening sentence of the Gay Republican joke made one friend think that Michael and I were breaking up, and one of my fellow bibliophile friends fell for the one where I Michael and I decided to throw away all 6000+ books in our house.

The point of a joke is to make people laugh. If they aren’t laughing, it isn’t funny.

I am fond of a good news April Fool’s Pranks. Among my favorites:

NPR: Portable Zip Codes

NPR: Exploding maple trees

Garden News: Dinosaur vine

And I can’t find a link to this one: one of the local radio stations did a story claiming one of the island out in Puget Sound had come loose from its moorings and was floating wildly around the Sound. They kept giving updates throughout the afternoon as the island was sighted in different places, along with attempts to try to capture it and tow it back.